Desperation: Robotic Twitter Bot spoofs "Climate Change Deniers"

From Technology Review, a case of desperation. “Let the robot handle it”. I have to chuckle though, since the article cites John Cook’s “Skeptical Science” as an “appropriate scientific source”. Also amusing is “the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.” Well since he is in New South Wales, I’m thinking this just might be another Tim Lambert aka Deltoid production. Hacker News sums it up pretty well:

> In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

On the one hand the idea of a reverse search engine is somewhat appealing, on the other hand; it’s Clippy for the internet.

– Anthony

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.

Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion – which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.

If you could point attribution my way, this would be some pretty big bragging rights for me here in my little corner of the ‘net.

Thanks.

– Borepatch

Happy to do so! Sometimes humor spreads like wildfire without proper attribution because people are so focused on the funny, they forget the source. Your Clippy parody has been a source of humor for thousands, and we thank you. – Anthony

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Now if we could just get someone to write a bot to present the skeptical side of the argument we could all sit back on the sidelines and watch the two bots go at it. A sort of robot wars for climate science.

Somehow this reminds me of DILBERT being tasked with finding out if the “responder” on a computer “chat” system was a real human or a “robot”.
Dilbert typed in a question which any archtyple manager would answer with a complete “buzzword” response.
Indeed, that’s what he got. Last frame of the strip, shows Dilbert pulling back a screen (curtain) and the PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) saying, “How did you know it was me?”
In this case, I’d REVERSE the logic and point out that the establishment of this “application” shows that the “arguements” of the Global Warming types is so TRITE, so CANNED and SO PREDICTABLE that they DON’T HAVE TO BE THERE IN REAL HUMAN PRESENCE to respond.
Now here is the point on this: Their arguements have become “reflexive” and useless.
I would hope that MY level of discussion would always be such that it would at LEAST take a 5th grader to respond, maybe even a high school senior. (They might be more dynamic than your typical “climate scientist”.)
Max

Watts says:
I have to chuckle though, since the article cites John Cook’s “Skeptical Science” as an “appropriate scientific source”.
What’s your problem anthony? If you have some issues with the content over at SKS then you can point out where the plethora of scientific studies supporting each post is wrong? I don’t know of many other websites which include the most recent peer-review literature in every topic… making backhanded comments like that just proves that we are right to return the favor.REPLY: Heh, still chuckling. – Anthony

Well, when lots of rifles are aimed at you, the best response is a robot with a machine gun.
Oh wait, that’s a war analogy. I keep forgetting this is supposed to be about scientific investigation, deary me. Well I’m sure his automated response script is helping people on twitter explore their own curiosity just like science should, amirite? What better way to promote independent and creative thought than to have a robot rapid-fire off the “right things” to read whenever someone might be going astray, right?
/sarcasm

“Now if we could just get someone to write a bot to present the skeptical side of the argument we could all sit back on the sidelines and watch the two bots go at it. A sort of robot wars for climate science.”
Please don’t. That could trigger a feedback loop and destroy the earth. We could be talking total protonic reversal here.

So that’s why it replied to me in such an idiotic manner when i posted a a comment and link for a WUWT. After tweeting I got a quick reply pointing to a youtube post about AGW which wasn’t even entertaining.
I blocked the account now. Thanks for the heads up and kudos to Anthony for all the effort.

Another great post from WUWT.
How about a live debate with Bob Carter, Ian Pilmer, Jo Nova to name just a few Aussies and several Kiwis to be added.
Forgot Ken S. , D Archibald, Bob Tisdale.
Perhaps, like James Cameron, they will disinvite themselves.
Maybe, now that the ABC (Aus) is reconsidering their position, now is the time for a televised debate challenge.
Some hope!

Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases…
Looking at this from 30,000 feet, as it were, I can see where this is yet another exploit of yet another popular and sometimes useful Internet feature. Twitter is used by many, so I guess eventually there will be many bots sending many canned responses about anything to unsuspecting users. Kind of a “search engine poisoning” style exploit in tweet form. It pays to know your twitter followers!

I can see how that might come in handy… I bet it got old answering “but it snowed a lot this year”, “its been cooling since 1998” or “its good for plants” argument year after year…. hehe…
I love this website… its so entertaining…

Q. How do you tell the difference between a Climate Bot and an AGW believer?
A. The Bot won’t think a picture of a polar bear constitutes an argument (unless it’s really badly written).
B. The Bot doesn’t suffer from a persecution complex and won’t accuse you of being in the pay of Big Oil because it has run out of arguments.
C. The Bot doesn’t have to be embarassed about it’s huge carbon footprint.
D. The Bot won’t turn up at your front door.
E. You’ve got the better chance of getting the Bot to see reason.

Jeez, it’s not like you have to run a Turing test on this thing. The fact that it’s not responding in all capitals with misspelled ad hominem attacks should be a hint that you’re not arguing with a warmist.

Doesn’t this just make the point that the alarmists are unthinking automotons who are impervious to logic and reason since they can be easily emulated by a program that simply repeats the same pabulum over and over? It also seems to illustrate the fact that they believe simple repetition is actually a form of logical argumentation. 🙂

Applause for the effort and idea, pretty funny really.
Based on Muhandis’ post above, I’d say the programmer needs to slow the response, or perhaps randomize the response times.
Got to laugh thinking about someone pounding on their keyboard after getting responses in milliseconds in an Internet flame war.
Anyway, nice effort. And Clippy sure is a lot of fun at the office…

This may be the start of a sad and worrying trend. There appears to be a widespread and curious perception that anyone should be able to understand the intricacies of climate – that we no longer defer to experts, but that all of our opinions, no matter how ill-informed, are valid. It takes considerable effort, a lot of hard work and a long time to get a good understanding on any area of science. Much like climbing a mountain peak – the more energy you put in the higher you can get and the more you can see.
Currently, we mostly have imbeciles in fog filled valleys claiming that they can see as clearly as the vision of someone who is high up the hillside, with binoculars and above the clouds. In encouraging this process, by never correcting even the most egregiously moronic statements, these guys do a disservice to science.

Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside thinking about how these dogmatic AGWers view the general masses as being incapable of utilizing their cranial matter and thus deserve nothing more than an automated braindead repetative response to their queries ?
It must be a heavy weight to carry on one’s shoulders when one is omnipotent.
So who’s the self-appointed climatological/geology/astrophysics/heliology/thermodynamics/oceanography/meteorlogical/physics expert that’s responsible for keeping the bot up to date as the sciences continue to learn and evolve on a daily basis ?

Fudsdad says:
November 4, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Watching “What the Green Movement got wrong”.
They were wrong on nuclear power, DDT and GM food…
_____
Green movement was wrong about DDT? Really?
Sorry, don’t think so…and as far as nuclear power, well, just talk to the people downwind from Chernobyl…the one’s still alive will tell you how great it is…

R. Gates says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Fudsdad says:
November 4, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Watching “What the Green Movement got wrong”.
They were wrong on nuclear power, DDT and GM food…
_____
Green movement was wrong about DDT? Really?
Sorry, don’t think so…and as far as nuclear power, well, just talk to the people downwind from Chernobyl…the one’s still alive will tell you how great it is…
Well …they did..i watched the programme…do you know how many died?..do you want to tell us? Seems you have drunk deep from the fountain of disinformation…meh jog on!

Foxgoose says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I thought they already invented a warmbot that churned out repetitive and irrelevant chunks of green orthodoxy to thwart intelligent questions – it’s called Real Climate isn’t it?
oh you just beat me to it, i was going to say said bot was indistinguishable from…
Joe Romm

Foxgoose says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I thought they already invented a warmbot that churned out repetitive and irrelevant chunks of green orthodoxy to thwart intelligent questions – it’s called Real Climate isn’t it?
Around here it is called R.Gates, which I assume is short for Robot.Gates

R. Gates says: November 4, 2010 at 4:19 pm
“…and as far as nuclear power, well, just talk to the people downwind from Chernobyl…the one’s still alive will tell you how great it is…”
Please, … try to get a few facts right before commenting. There were 28 immediate fatalities at Chernobyl, and another 24 during the following decades. Here’s a summary of the UN Atomic Energy Commission reportshttp://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html
For an independent short discussion of the events leading to the accident, go here:http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/03/03/what-happened-at-chernobyl/
So 26 years ago, the world saw the quality of Soviet reactor design and operation. The RBMK model reactor had no containment vessel, as all non-Soviet power reactors had, and all modern designs have. About as impressive as soviet automobiles. The operators manually overrode the safety features and ran a test they knew was unstable. That one “accident” in a world of more than 400 operating nuclear power plants, and the industry is still statistically safer than the coal or oil or hydropower industries. There were 4 units at the Chernobyl site and the other 3 ran for years before being shut down so that Ukraine could join the EU.
Furthermore, there are some epidemiologists who claim the total fatalities from the accident is a negative number. Yes, the cancer rate is lower downwind than the general population. Do a search on Zbiginew Jaworowski Chernobyl Folly (it’s a .pdf and I can’t link it).
Here’s a link to a report on the Taiwanese apartment complex that accidentally was built with steel contaminated with Cobalt-60, and not discovered for more than 10 years, Some reports show the cancer rate only 4% of the general population. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/
Greenpeace has caused far more harm than good with their anti-nuke pseudoscience and just plain scaremongering baloney.

Chernobyl
Terrible what happened to those people, regardless of how many or few there were. That’s it, no more nuclear power plants.
Now hydro damns, they never burst and wipe out towns downriver do they? They do? OK, no more hydro damns.
Now oil is pretty safe, we can drill for oil. Oh right, that sour gas thing, deadly and kills everyone for miles and miles.
OK coal. No one ever dies from a coal accident right? Oh, right, just all those miners when the mine collapses, but other than that? What? Coal ash is radioactive? Worse than a nuclear reactor unless you install scrubbers? Can’t take that chance.
Seriously, I get a real snarl on when someone says “no nuclear, look what happened at Chernobyl”. ALL industries have accidents and the right response is not “shut it down” the right response is “how do we make it safer?”
In the case of Chernobyl the answer is don’t design a reactor where the rods fall into each other in the event of a failure, causing a melt down, and don’t, and I mean DON’T let some idiot scientist shut off the safety systems so he can run an experiment that exceeded the safety limits of the reactor. Three Mile Island was another bone head move, the safety systems started kicking in and the operators decided that the sensors must be wrong because nothing similar had ever happened before and bypassed them.
Monstrous mistakes with devastating consequences but very preventable and I submit that if you add up all the deaths ever in every energy industry and turn it into a deaths per petawatt hour you’ll find that nuclear isn’t even close to number 1.

So a programmer plies his trade to try and amplify his voice in public discourse. Time and effort probably better spent on working in support of the actual underlying research.
Heard about some bloke called Harry who is dealing with broken databases and a big ball of mud of Fortran scripts etc. Sounds like he could make use of a Good Samaritan programmer.

R. Gates: Seehttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/climatescience/attachments/folder/2000398240/item/list
IanM
R. Gates says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Fudsdad says:
November 4, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Watching “What the Green Movement got wrong”.
They were wrong on nuclear power, DDT and GM food…
_____
Green movement was wrong about DDT? Really?
Sorry, don’t think so…and as far as nuclear power, well, just talk to the people downwind from Chernobyl…the one’s still alive will tell you how great it is…

I hate the use of the term “climate change deniers”, which was used in the title. No one denies that the climate is changing. It has always been changing. The deniers don’t believe the climate is being changed by human produced CO2. Whenever the term “climate change denier” is used, a protest should be made and a request made to replace the term with “CO2 effect denier”.
The fact that the climate has always been changing is one of the proofs that man made CO2 is not the cause of climate change. To be called a “climate change denier” is a slur.

The Monty Python skit, the Argument Clinic comes to mind with Nigel Leck as Mr Vibrating.
Man: Oh look, this isn’t an argument.
Mr Vibrating: Yes it is.
Man: No it isn’t. It’s just contradiction.
Mr Vibrating: No it isn’t.
Man: It is!
Mr Vibrating: It is not.
Man: Look, you just contradicted me.
Mr Vibrating: I did not.
Man: Oh you did!!
Mr Vibrating: No, no, no.
Man: You did just then.
Mr Vibrating: Nonsense!
Man: Oh, this is futile!
Mr Vibrating: No it isn’t.
Man: I came here for a good argument.
Mr Vibrating: No you didn’t; no, you came here for an argument.
Man: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
Mr Vibrating: It can be.
Man: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Mr Vibrating: No it isn’t.
Man: Yes it is! It’s not just contradiction.
Mr Vibrating: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Man: Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
Mr Vibrating: Yes it is!
Man: No it isn’t!
Man: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
Mr Vibrating: No it isn’t.

davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2010 at 5:32 pm
“Monstrous mistakes with devastating consequences but very preventable and I submit that if you add up all the deaths ever in every energy industry and turn it into a deaths per petawatt hour you’ll find that nuclear isn’t even close to number 1.”
David: Here’s a link to a paper that shows just that.http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html
The summary, in fatalities/TeraWatt-year is: Coal: 597, Natural Gas: 111, Hydro: 10,285, nuclear: 48
The numbers include mining, transportation, generation, and direct waste handling. The numbers do not include estimates for lung disease downwind of emitters. The reason the hydro number is high is the collapse of a few dams and flooding downstream. Coal is high because of the quantity of transportation needed.

I think that Leck’s Bot is a great idea. The same sorts of arguments against AGW are constantly being made, despite the fact that they have been debunked. The people making them are not really thinking clearly, and the fact that a Bot can provide a reply that is to the point and backed with scientific literature is great.
If Anthony could show that the Bot is producing wrong or inappropriate, or misleading answers, he would have a case against this idea. Simply claiming that Skeptical Science is no good won’t pass. It does quote recent scientific literature as a counter to the GW skeptic’s claims.
So far, all I have seen as the case against Leck’s Bot amounts to cheerleading by GW skeptics for their side.

eadler says:
November 4, 2010 at 6:26 pm
————————-
eadler – I think that the arguments for the case of CAGW are trite, shallow, repetitive and easily reduced to tweet length. I believe a tweetbot to be completely capable of reproducing in entirety the sum of factual knowledge in favour of anthropogenic global warming and completely agree with you that it is a great idea.
It’s a fantastic way of showing off how hollow the argument is.

This is a very funny post. It’s absurd at so many levels. Who on earth would think CAGW could be debated on twitter? What and how long would it take to realise the ‘debate’ is with a bot? Why would anyone bother with twitter anyway? The basic philosophy -if one may call it a ‘philosophy’- behind twitter is absurd. M8, any1 with 1/2 brain should know that there is no reason why communication should be restricted to 160 characters. Is there a worldwide shortage of bandwith or what?
As for the twitter-bot, this indeed is the kind of mendacity right up Tim Lambert’s alley. Of all the pro-CAGW blogs I have visited, Lambert’s Deltoid has the most obnoxious set of commenters ever imaginable. The guy has a unique talent that attracts only the bad CAGW cultists, and extract the worst out of them. IMHO, the only skeptic that would visit Deltoid for a debate are the ones with a masachistic streak. If you have any self-respect, don’t visit Deltoid. Never whatsoever!
The one and only thread at Deltoid that I bothered to post anything on was late last year. That would also be the one and only time in my life that I ever visited a blog or a website for purposes of trolling, and I fr@kking loved it!http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/on_those_stolen_cru_emails.php#comment-2102934

David J Ameling said:
“The fact that the climate has always been changing is one of the proofs that man made CO2 is not the cause of climate change. ”
Nothing wrong here, except that CO2 has always been in the atmosphere changing climate.
In order for that to prove CO2 is not one of the causes of climate change would require proving that CO2 has never been in the atmosphere, quite a tall order I’m afraid.

re: Dan in California says: November 4, 2010 at 6:14 pm
& davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2010 at 5:32 pm
& R. Gates & others on the nuclear power issue
Last I knew, statistically in the USA you are actually safer working in a nuclear power plant than in your own home. Darned all those kids toys to trip over, stairs to fall down, etc…. Meanwhile epidemiology shows that nuclear workers are also healthier than non-nuclear workers. That’s with all known confounding factors such as socioeconomic status etc., accounted for. This has been well known for a long time and is called the healthy worker effect.
Also contrary to what some expect, multiple studies of laboratory animals and cultures have actually shown that exposure to low level radiation (well above natural levels) not only causes no harm but can improve various health measures. Hormesis.
Meanwhile, multiple long term studies of populations living near nuclear facilities, including Three Mile Island, show no overall increase in any levels of cancer compared to socioeconomically matched populations that live nowhere near nuclear facilities.
Many years ago I was conducting some “First Responder” emergency planning training (firemen, policemen, bus drivers, etc. and of course the reporting chain including mayors, governors, etc). One quite nice fellow came up later to ask if he had anything to worry about with his family. They lived about 18 miles away as the crow flies from a nuclear power plant and he wondered if he ought to consider moving them further away. So, let’s see…. the power plant had been operating for a few decades with zero radiation related injuries, let alone any deaths, even for those who actually worked in the plant. What else was relevant, perhaps, about where this family lived? In the other direction, a couple of miles away from their house was a chemical plant that on average had one or two people killed each year or every couple of years in explosions or accidents.
What else to consider? We can easily detect radiation down to fractions of the amount you are exposed to from background radiation – orders of magnitude lower than where any possible harm occurs. The power plants are extensively and continuously monitored for any potential accident, for any releases to air or water, are regularly inspected, heavily regulated, and have extensive emergency plans in place and with regular safety drills… none of which could be said for the chemical plant.
If I were to worry about either of these facilities for my family, which would I worry about? Hum……
Just a side note – the only time that particular plant’s emergency plans were used, and they were a couple of times that I know of back around that time, had nothing to do with the power plant. There had been chemical spills from either tanker trucks or rail cars – and because the nuclear plant’s emergency plans existed and were known by the county officials, they modified them on the fly for use with those spills and were most grateful for having them and the training.
Is nuclear perfect or fail safe? No, but what is that is designed and run by humans? Is nuclear really safe in comparison to almost anything else used for power generation, and compared to most industries? Yes, its got a very good track record in that regard. The other thing that many folks don’t seem to realize is that we’ve got roughly 102 nuclear power plants on 50 some odd sites scattered around the nation, operating for decades now – with this safety record and they’ve only gotten more and more safe over time.

I worked it out after the first couple of tweets that it was a BOT. Leck is also an atheist, greenie (http://www.meetup.com/sydneyatheists/members/8903673/). Probably voted for Julia Gillard aka Fabian socialist, professed atheist who did a deal with the devil (Green communists). Saul Alinksy dedicated his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ to Lucifer. Check Leck’s Linked In page. Web links to Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Australian Greens. He has no qualifications which would support his knowledge (or lack there of, of climate science or indeed any science). He’s just an annoying BOT and Twitter should shut him down because his tweets are really SPAM, not conversation between two people.

BS Footprint says:
November 4, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Zorro says:
November 4, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Two can play this game.
Indeed. That’s what I expect to happen. Wish I had the time.
—
Don’t know about this particular goofball, but it seems a lot of taxpayer funded warmmongers having nothing but time to come up with this kind of crap. Hopefully, a whole lot of that is going to end thanks to this Tuesday’s sanity check.

davidmhoffer says:
November 4, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Chernobyl
—
And, add to your list of don’ts: Never build one with excessive positive feedbacks.
Only a climatologist or a mad russian scientist trying to adapt a weapons-grade plutonium producton reactor to produce a little power on the side would do that.

Ian P says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Currently, we mostly have imbeciles in fog filled valleys claiming that they can see as clearly as the vision of someone who is high up the hillside, with binoculars and above the clouds. In encouraging this process, by never correcting even the most egregiously moronic statements, these guys do a disservice to science.

The real problem is that many people who believe they’re up on that hillside apparently support all manner of government-mandated (coerced) remedies to whatever man-made climate changes may be occurring, rather than rely on free people to do the right thing once they have facts in hand.
So the ‘illuminated’ hill-sitters risk becoming useful pawns for those who wish to exploit their efforts to accumulate greater power or wealth — or, in some cases, it seems they knowingly get in bed with the power-grabbers.
Treating people as if they are inert matter, unwilling to and incapable of doing the right thing based their knowledge and beliefs, is high arrogance. And it’s downright rude.
So it’s only natural that some people who don’t have all the facts in hand, or can’t understand all the details of the science, push back against a perceived threat.
Sure, those who push back may play into the hands powerful interests that want to derail legislation, regulations, and the like. But that’s the natural consequence of treating people like morons, calling them names, and generally dismissing their concerns and fears out of hand.
As I’ve said before, insulting people is a lousy way to win an argument or an election. Ask Dale Carnegie.
If the pro-AGW/climate change science is so compelling and settled, then nothing less than full disclosure and open debate are mandatory. Trying to silence opposition or use ‘tricks’ to sell the pro-AGW/climate change case will only make things worse for those who wish to advance the ‘pro’ cause.

Yah Ive seen that bot. Argued with it too. I can usually pull better articles 🙂 I always get an answer if I use #climate as one of the hashtags. Now I know its a bot, but if it throws back some obscure utube reference and I throw back a better resource is it really doing the writer a service?

Ian P says:
November 4, 2010 at 4:00 pm
…by never correcting even the most egregiously moronic statements, these guys do a disservice to science.

Oh, and one more thing: by all means, correct any and all incorrect statements, however moronic they may or may not be. But be reasonably polite, you’ll win more over to your cause that way. If someone won’t listen to reason, if they reject all arguments out of hand, don’t get call them names, just move on.

EnginEar if I follow your logic correctly because I don’t believe in fairy tails ( sky daddy, a bloke living in a whale etc) that some how makes my arguments less valid ? Surely it’s the other way around.

BTW: pkatt when there is a new argument I do follow it through, I gotta say I’m not seeing many new arguments these days. Also it seems that many of the arguments are contradictory “it’s cosmic rays”, “it’s not warming”, “warming is good”, “co2 lags temp”, “co2 plant food”, “leftest plot”, “climate won’t change”, “climate always changes”, “why trust nasa they faked the moon landings”, “it’s magical moon beans” and the list goes on indeed it seems to be anything but co2.

The city of Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland, is built on granite, has granite buildings and is known as the Granite City. Background radiation is several times higher than permissible industry standards. Aberdeen is also known for the long-levity of it’s population.

Of course you would be a Nigel. No logic really just like your bot twits. Just making comments about what you really are. An atheist, socialist. None of which have been any good to mankind at all in history.

@EnginEar says:
November 4, 2010 at 8:39 pm
‘I worked it out after the first couple of tweets that it was a BOT. Leck is also an atheist..’
Look, I’m an atheist and a sceptic. In fact I learned my scepticism from trying to work out at the age of 13 whether there was a god or not. I came down on the non-believer side. I may be wrong or the believers may be wrong but the one thing I don’t worry about, which most of my Christian friends do, is what will happen to me after I die. And the critical and analytic thinking I learned then has carried me through the rest of my life. So can you try to avoid silly characterisations and fake correlations like this. My own view is that if he’s an atheist he should have a lot more sense and apply the same process to his substitute religious belief in cagw.

I’m no scientist. The first thing that made me feel that AGW ‘science’ was suspect was that its supporters were so closed minded. “Anybody who disagrees is either an oil shill, crackpot, or nut.” They look for any reason to dismiss someone’s opinion.
Even if you point them to a scientist whom they can’t dismiss, they’ll resort to, “it is only one guy.”
It is the closed-mindedness that I detest. Please, let AGWers come up with something compelling — I don’t mind if AGW is REAL, and HAPPENING, we just want EVIDENCE!!
Claiming, “Anyone who disagrees is an oil-shill” is NOT evidence; it is IRRATIONAL.
We know that politicians were positioning it as, “claim it is settled science” — let them explain their own politicians. Let them explain the basis for their feeling that the world needs saving from AGW, overpopulation, etc.
I too feel that we are heading for disasters. I sympathise with them on that. Disasters happen. World wars happen. Cataclysms happen. But AGW isn’t one of them. Please. Let’s try to identify the REAL dangers.

BS Footprint says:
Treating people as if they are inert matter, unwilling to and incapable of doing the right thing based their knowledge and beliefs, is high arrogance. And it’s downright rude.

Very true. Everyone on the planet is living their own life, with their own family, communities, workplace, cultures, economies, environment — their whole situation. The greenies seem to think they can generalise for everyone, using just one point of view, and come up with a solution that is best for everyone and for all species and the whole planet. The complexity is staggering. There are seven billion human brains on the planet, and one greenie believes that he or she can, on their own, do better. For everyone.
We don’t even understand the complexities of why one human develops the way they do — some become criminals, some brain surgeons. It isn’t just “education” or “opportunities” or “character” or “genes”. We don’t know how to heal one person, and yet they want to change the core cultural values and life purpose of everyone on the planet… and the closer they come to seeing the impossibility of that task, the sooner they start to resort to violence — “direct action”, “put democracy on hold” — basically, force people. It becomes a huge power game. And then the powerful win.
Capitalism may be a “cancer” or a “virus” because it is a small piece that invades everything, but many greenies have such a narrow point of view on the world that a) they are not holistic and b) the want this narrow point of view to invade everything and take over. Well, by their own definition, their narrow point of view is also a virus, trying to invade a greater whole that it doesn’t understand nor care about.
They claim to be holistic. The funny thing about being holistic is that it has to include ALL wholes. Most greenies just don’t. They ignore most of the world, and imagine their own point of view is holistic, when actually it cuts out much of what is of value to billions of people.

Twitter is the loser in all this, these chatbots are all that is going to be left, all communicating with each other, spewing junk data. But that is what environmentalists are renowned for. Twitter needs to cull this kind of activity before it makes the site obsolete.

@ RichieP
“the one thing I don’t worry about, which most of my Christian friends do, is what will happen to me after I die. ”
Thinking about your own mortality is not the same as worrying about it. If your friends are indeed Christians then they will know that ultimately they have something to look forward to. Many Christian martyrs throught the centuries (including, unfortunately, this century) have been willing to face death and their calmness has often led to the conversion of others.
This is all really a bit off-topic but since Green beliefs are often criticised as a substitute religion I suppose such digressions are excusable.
By the way, I am not saying that because some Greenies seem to take the Gaia hypothesis rather too literally (instead of as a vivid metaphor) the rest of us, whatever our beliefs, should not be concerned with environmental issues. We should, but in an intelligent way.
I think all sceptics should be open to the possibility that man-made CO2 is the main driver of climate change. The only difference between sceptics and mainstream climate scientists should be that we should want the scientists to do a really thorough job and examine all the evidence impartially, continue searching for new evidence, check the reliablity of their data and the instruments used to gather it, examine and test their models diligently, publish their data and computer codes for anyone to examine, and also explore other hypotheses, such as Svensmark’s cosmic rays and cloud cover hypothesis, with the same diligence.
In other words we should want climate scientists to act like scientists are supposed to and not like an in-group of political activists or a quasi-religious cult.

EnginEar: The question of if a god ( a being that exists outside of space/time and created the universe as we see it) exists or not is a truth claim. The answer (whether we know it or not) is the same for you and I. Also no amount of wishing has any bearing on the outcome of this truth claim.
Now your statement “atheist… None… any good” sounds like you’re choosing what you believe based on what you think is best not based on the evidence. Which may explain your views on climate change.

Stefan: I had no dog in this fight when I first looked into it, listened to the likes of Monckton/Plimer. I have followed many of the skeptics points though and many lead to dead ends ( cosmic rays. stopped warming in 98 etc) then many more seemingly random and contradictory points were sent my way like ( not warming, warming is good, changes all the time, Urban Heat Island but sure Mars is warming etc ) the only common thread was it’s anything but us burning fossil fuels.

Nigel Leck says:
Stefan: I had no dog in this fight when I first looked into it, listened to the likes of Monckton/Plimer. I have followed many of the skeptics points though and many lead to dead ends ( cosmic rays. stopped warming in 98 etc) then many more seemingly random and contradictory points were sent my way like ( not warming, warming is good, changes all the time, Urban Heat Island but sure Mars is warming etc ) the only common thread was it’s anything but us burning fossil fuels.

I don’t find those to be “dead ends” nor “contradictory”. They are all potential pieces of the puzzle. In a complex system with multiple processes interacting, what do you expect? Our knowledge is partial, incomplete, and open-ended. Nobody has proved it is cosmic rays, but then nobody has proved it is fossil fuels. It is like trying to work out if a certain food is healthy, unhealthy, can cause disease, or protect from disease. I gather they are still trying to work out if being overweight is worse than underweight, given all the different things that each one is associated with. It is called complexity. Maybe burning fossil fuels does have a detrimental effect, but the effect and the causality is so tenuous that you may as well stay interested in cosmic rays. Given how weak the evidence is for CO2 induced AGW, (and masses of weak evidence adds up to a totality of… weak evidence), you may as well keep an open mind about other ideas. What you are calling “dead ends” are merely avenues that are still being researched, or should be. But nobody is claiming that cosmic rays’ influence on climate are a certainty, and yet people claim CO2 AGW is a certainty, “irrefutable”. So start by asking why they are so certain, and examine what’s underneath that. See if you find dead ends, in the form of lack of solid evidence. Ask yourself, in which ways might they be wrong? And then ask, how did they check to make sure that they aren’t wrong? That’s where you can find your dead ends.

Nigel,
You seem to have a fondness for strawmen and over-simplification, but nothing you have stated has any facts behind it. Nor logic. It is not our job to disapprove, it is the CAGW side to present proof which should be reproducible in order to check it. They haven’t done it. And the only common thread to CAGW reports (climategate, glaciergate, amazongate, watergate, etc) is ‘more money please’.
We are still waiting for the facts. And, yes, to find them you need to hit a lot of dead ends. The problem has been that the CAGW people keep trying to sell us those dead ends as proof. Skeptics refine their beliefs as facts begin to fill in the huge blank spaces of ignorance. And discard the deadends. CAGW people cling to their mistakes (Wang, Jones 1990, Mann et al Hockey Stick, etc) which is why they have to keep changing their header: global warming, climate change, climate disruption. What a waste of energy.
The CAGW scientists are not stupid men. Just think what advancements might have been made if that money had been dedicated to: a) establishing standards of releasing all code and raw data and archiving it b) extensive study of clouds c) bringing up to a high standard our SST sites in the US and encouraging/aiding the rest of the world to do the same c) money spent in “convincing kids” spent on clean water in Africa. Think of all the idiotic projects (Caitlin survey, Copenhagen et al) that wouldn’t have been funded. Think of all the incredible conventional projects that could have been funded.
Can you say that you are better off now than ten years ago with the BILLIONS that have been spent on climate science and educational and political selling of it?? Not by anyone’s standards. It is one of my greatest frustrations is that we have wasted so much money with such little result. The little information we can rely on is still not even close to establishing ANYTHING we should be staking our money and our futures on.

IAN H said:
Now if we could just get someone to write a bot to present the skeptical side of the argument we could all sit back on the sidelines and watch the two bots go at it. A sort of robot wars for climate science.
————————————————————-
Already being worked on, sort of. Remember, don’t trust either robot:
“They are here to protect us”.
Regards…

@Roy
Hear Hear!
Conservation not Consternation!
As a Christian I couldn’t care less about the beliefs of others, we all choose whatever belief system supports our emotional architecture. Faith, however, is a different kettle of fish and I really don’t want to pursue that topic here since spirituality operates outside of and parallel to intellectual processes. Nothing to do with the thread.
What I do care about in the context of this ongoing ‘debate’ is the quality of scientifically robust evidence used to justify political policies which are already adversely affecting the global population.
I have been a conservationist for a very long time now and remain unimpressed by the tactics and effects of Greenpeace, WWF and many others and equally underwhelmed by the case presented for CO2drivenAGW.
The fact that bots can be designed to ‘respond’ to given phrases and keywords does not advance the debate, does not strengthen any evidence by repetition and certainly doesn’t enrich the global culture towards which we could all be working.
I feel that what we are witnessing is a slow crumbling of a corrupted concept designed solely to grab power and maintain that power by fear.
Hopefully, the events in the USA this week will turn the tide and we’ll see some rationality come back into global politics and perhaps some real and radical help for those people groups genuinely threatened by Natural Climate Change.

eadler says:
November 4, 2010 at 6:26 pm
I think that Leck’s Bot is a great idea. The same sorts of arguments against AGW are constantly being made, despite the fact that they have been debunked. The people making them are not really thinking clearly, and the fact that a Bot can provide a reply that is to the point and backed with scientific literature is great.
If Anthony could show that the Bot is producing wrong or inappropriate, or misleading answers, he would have a case against this idea. Simply claiming that Skeptical Science is no good won’t pass. It does quote recent scientific literature as a counter to the GW skeptic’s claims.
So far, all I have seen as the case against Leck’s Bot amounts to cheerleading by GW skeptics for their side.
All I can say (and this may sound familiar to you eadler) is that the same sorts of arguments against natural climate change (NCC) are constantly being made, despite the fact that they have been debunked. The people making them are not really thinking clearly. The fact that a bot can provide a reply that can’t be distinguished from one prepared by a human is proof that AGW/CC/CD alarmists are just reading from the list of authorized responses. Not thinking for yourself reduces energy demand and lowers your carbon footprint… good strategy. You have been replaced, made redundant, by a bot.
Maybe you are a bot, how would we know?

Nigel Leck says:
November 4, 2010 at 11:14 pm
No sky daddy huh. Well good for you. Obviouly you don’t believe in the precautionary principle. Again good for you.
However, being that you are someone as you say that has looked into this matter can you help with something. I am having difficulty with the First Law of Thermodynamics and the Big Bang Theory. You know the part about energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Any help will do.

Dave from the “Hot” North East of Scotland says:
November 5, 2010 at 6:44 am
“Hopefully, the events in the USA this week will turn the tide and we’ll see some rationality come back into global politics and perhaps some real and radical help for those people groups genuinely threatened by Natural Climate Change.”
____
Nice thoughts but quite unlikely. There will not be rationality in either U.S. nor global politics any time soon, and certainly nothing that has happening in the U.S. is going to change that. As far a people threatened by “Natural” climate change, why is it my responsibility to “help” them? When the climate changes you move or adapt…that’s the “natural” thing to do as it is what species have done for millions of years.

Scientism is where people believe that science is the answer to every truth, without qualification. So, is there a god? becomes a scientific question. If science can find no evidence for God then there is none.
There is also no evidence for love, by the way. None whatsoever that can be measured with an instrument. Did you do something kind for your grandma by sending her her favourite flowers on her dead husband’s anniversary? Scientifically, there is nothing about that which can be objectively quantified as “love”. Nothing whatsoever. To the purely objective gaze, there is no love. Not anywhere.
Science does incredibly important stuff — but there’s also incredibly important stuff that science can’t do and never will. It can’t interpret the meaning of your feelings. It can’s make moral judgements.
If scientifically you can demonstrate than a course of action will lead to the death of thousands, a dictator may be very happy with that and judge it to be a “good” course of action. Nothing in science can argue with moral judgements. They are not objectively studied.
So, whilst many people are techy atheists who think rational people by defininition don’t believe in God, well, that’s a narrow point of view. It is a bit blinkered. We don’t go through life operating purely by reason. Much of life is moral intuitive cultural subjective feelings and judgements. What makes a great work of art? What makes a noble person? What is love?
OK, now there’s a bit of a problem when people who wish to be ultra rational and objective are faced with climate change. See, climate change is mostly the work of scientists, and in the “science is rational and objective” techy camp, this means that if you are going to listen to anybody, you damn well listen to scientists. THEY are the arbiters of truth. They are the authority. They have data and reason. So THEY are to be believed.
But culturally and morally we know that this is not a good idea. What if we believed the police? They say the find no evidence of institutional racism. And they are meant to be upholders of the law, with checks and balances. So there can be no racism. Likewise the medical profession, or any other profession.
No, it is a myth that scientists are 100% objective. Cultural and moral judgements, which are NOT objective, are also made by scientists. Whom to fund, whom to favour, whom to promote, whom to listen to, who is getting the attention, where is the hot interest going? These are not 100% objective questions. There is no such thing as an entirely objective culture. But some people believe scientists so unquestioningly that this is in effect what they believe; scientists are all operating 100% objectively.
Try asking scientists whether that is true.

R. Gates says:
November 5, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Dave from the “Hot” North East of Scotland says:
November 5, 2010 at 6:44 am
“Hopefully, the events in the USA this week will turn the tide and we’ll see some rationality come back into global politics and perhaps some real and radical help for those people groups genuinely threatened by Natural Climate Change.”
____
Nice thoughts but quite unlikely.
—–
Have to agree with you there, R. I was somewhat euphoric until I read the link posted recently in Tips and Notes about how the states were spending 215% more than their tax take with Obama regime happily financing the spending orgy with funny money (that runs out in June ’11). I knew we were headed towards bailouts for states. But, it hadn’t set in that Obama had already started it and the scope of it was already massive.
Those repubs swept into power at the state level, this week, are just in time to preside over the impending collapse of state finances, as O’s script plays out…

My bot answers all queries infallibly. It calls any AGW doubter a denialist and demands that they apologise for the holocaust, the crusades, the MWP, etc. So if you disagree you are a jerk – and we know you’re a jerk because you disagree. That shuts them up! My wondrous bot blames AGW for warming, cooling and stasis. It is correct in predicting that rainfall is higher, lower and unchanged. It proves that all dissent is due to oil companies and Big Cigarette. It uses El Nino warmings as proof of CAGW and ignores La Nina cooling. It has an interactive computer simulation of the climate so that visitors to the website can experience for themselves the thrill of fiddling with parameters until the desired result is obtained. It also has a section where God answers questions, like His answers to Job out of the whirlwind. The answers are always right because it only answers questions on past events. Questions about future events are programmed to cue emission of the words ‘consensus’, ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘could’, ‘up to’, ‘scientists say’ and debates on whether the Number Of The Beast is a backwards satanic version of George W. Bush’s tax file number.

Nigel Leck says:
November 5, 2010 at 5:23 am
Stefan: I had no dog in this fight when I first looked into it, listened to the likes of Monckton/Plimer. I have followed many of the skeptics points though and many lead to dead ends ( cosmic rays. stopped warming in 98 etc) then many more seemingly random and contradictory points were sent my way like ( not warming, warming is good, changes all the time, Urban Heat Island but sure Mars is warming etc ) the only common thread was it’s anything but us burning fossil fuels.

You should not have expected to find a consistent message amongst the skeptics.
It would be reasonable to expect any single skeptic to have and defend a consistent point of view, and indeed I’d be glad to defend my own beliefs on this subject, but it is not reasonable to expect that of skeptics as a whole. What makes us skeptics is not that we all believe the same thing, it is rather that we disbelieve the same thing – often for very different reasons.
The green movement is full of idealistic young things with bright shining eyes out to save the world. Yes they are foolish young idiots, but you cannot fault their idealism or commitment. It is merely wisdom that they are lacking but the young have always lacked in that department. It must be great to find yourself a part of that exciting movement surrounded by all those admirable beautiful people marching off to save the world.
The skeptic camp by comparison is quite disparate. While there are many skeptics that I admire – our esteemed host for example who has demonstrated tremendous personal integrity under extremely trying circumstances – other skeptics are people who I quite frankly detest; the right-wing Obama-haters who keep trying to make everything into a US political issue (you know who you are); or people like EnginEar who are religious bigots and seem to think CAGW is an atheist/communist conspiracy to create a world government. One of the unfortunate aspects of being a skeptic can be having to rub shoulders with people like these.
However you must follow the truth wherever it is to be found. Yes it would be convenient to believe in CAGW and join all those beautiful young people as part of their `movement to save the world’. I see the attraction in it to be sure. But having looked at the evidence I simply can’t do that. I am a skeptic for the same reason I am an atheist – my beliefs are not for sale. And so I find myself hanging out here in the skeptic camp … with EnginEar.

Stefan “proven” is an interesting word, your usage is more like how we use it in mathematical terms. There are very few things in life we can “prove” and indeed you would not wait before speeding up when walking across the road until we are certain the car will hit you.

Ian H: the bot is not aimed at genuine areas of debate. It’s aimed at phrases like “no warming since 1998” which I’m sorry is just wrong or when someone raises “temperature record is invalid due to the urban heat effect” that instantly leads to the question “how does that explain the satellite records?”

John Nicklin says:
November 5, 2010 at 8:36 am
“eadler says:
November 4, 2010 at 6:26 pm
I think that Leck’s Bot is a great idea. The same sorts of arguments against AGW are constantly being made, despite the fact that they have been debunked. The people making them are not really thinking clearly, and the fact that a Bot can provide a reply that is to the point and backed with scientific literature is great.
If Anthony could show that the Bot is producing wrong or inappropriate, or misleading answers, he would have a case against this idea. Simply claiming that Skeptical Science is no good won’t pass. It does quote recent scientific literature as a counter to the GW skeptic’s claims.
So far, all I have seen as the case against Leck’s Bot amounts to cheerleading by GW skeptics for their side.
All I can say (and this may sound familiar to you eadler) is that the same sorts of arguments against natural climate change (NCC) are constantly being made, despite the fact that they have been debunked. The people making them are not really thinking clearly. The fact that a bot can provide a reply that can’t be distinguished from one prepared by a human is proof that AGW/CC/CD alarmists are just reading from the list of authorized responses. Not thinking for yourself reduces energy demand and lowers your carbon footprint… good strategy. You have been replaced, made redundant, by a bot.
Maybe you are a bot, how would we know?”
Sorry, but there are no arguments against natural climate change. Prior to the industrial there was only climate change and there are still natural factors that are causing climate change. What has been added to the mix is human caused climate change. This was first described by Arrhenius in 1896 who made the first attempt to compute the effect of doubling CO2 concentration on global temperature.
James Hansen, the pioneering scientist one the founders of climatology certainly accepts the reality of naturally caused climate change. Check out the section on the lessons of history in the following essay by Hansen:
naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh2.html
Whether I am a bot is immaterial. Your premise that AGW proponents are denying that natural climate change exists is nonsense.
The argument being made is that the warming due to GHG emissions will overwhelm the natural forces over the long run, if we continue on the current course.

Stefan: can I say I didn’t start the conversation about god, if you look back you’ll see it says something like “Leck is also an atheist”, so ok, if you want to talk about evidence and reason then ok, lets have

eadler: if any of the canned answers are wrong or misleading I will correct. See answer for sun/solar below:-
SUN_01 last 35yrs the ☀ has shown a slight cooling trend & yet global warming continues http://is.gd/cMpSh
SUN_02 “The ☀ is waking ↑ from a deep slumber” ~ NASA scientist. May boost GW ㏌ next decade http://is.gd/cMwp0
SOLAR_ACTIVITY_SUNSPOTS_GLOBAL_WARMING Sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming http://is.gd/dDRjC
GLOBAL_WARMING_OTHER_PLANETS_SOLAR_SYSTEM Mars & Jupiter are not warming & anyway sun has recently been cooling slightly http://is.gd/dDRfx
SOLAR_CYCLE_LENGTH Sun has not warmed since 1970 & so cannot be driving global warming http://is.gd/dDRmY
ACRIM_PMOD_SUN_GETTING_HOTTER Sun’s output has just oscillated since 1970 with a slight cooling trend http://is.gd/dDRoD
SOLAR_CYCLES_GLOBAL_WARMING Over recent decades,sun has been slightly cooling & is irrelevant to recent global warming http://is.gd/dDU2y
SUNSPOTS_AND_WATER_LEVELS This detail is irrelevant to observation of global warming caused by humans http://is.gd/dDRp7
SUN_SPOT_MINIMUM_2010 Sun spot activity is at record lows in 2010, yet globally on track to be the hottest year recorded http://is.gd/dUwP2

Nigel Leck says:
November 5, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Ian H: the bot is not aimed at genuine areas of debate. It’s aimed at phrases like “no warming since 1998″ which I’m sorry is just wrong or when someone raises “temperature record is invalid due to the urban heat effect” that instantly leads to the question “how does that explain the satellite records?”

The satellite records? They show some warming, but not nearly of the same extent as the land temperature records. Sea surface temperature readings show even less warming, or in some cases cooling, and seem dominated in any case by natural cycles. Both satellite and SST records are much more reliable measures of overall global temperature than extrapolations from land based records. It is the land based record that is the odd one out, and given the documented problems with that record it is reasonable to ask why so much reliance is placed on it.
Nigel – you seem like a reasonable guy. Would you be amenable to extending the coverage of your bot so that it similarly responds to invalid stuff mentioned by the other side. In other words phrases like “accelerating rises in sea level”, or “1998 … the hottest year on record” or “glaciers melted by 2035” or “catastrophic release of methane” or “increased drought” would generate appropriate references to the literature which debunks those claims. I have no objections to a bot acting as a neutral referee and calling foul on anyone who oversteps the facts. However it appears you have programmed your bot to only lend support to one side of the argument.

Ian H: This is what I have for the error in the IPCC report about the Himalayan glacier by 2035. That was an error, it was admitted and corrects are made. That’s how science works. It is untrue to infer that glaciers are not meltingIPCC_HIMALAYAN_GLACIER_2035_PREDICTIONGlaciers are in rapid retreat worldwide,despite 1 error in 1 paragraph in a 1000 page IPCC report http://is.gd/dDU4U

Nigel Leck: Also it seems that many of the arguments are contradictory “it’s cosmic rays”…
Cosmic rays probably do have some effect on cloud cover. The mechanism is known, and demonstrable. Building a cosmic ray detector at home is as simple as making a cloud chamber. See for yourself:http://cosmic.lbl.gov/
… “it’s not warming”, “warming is good”, …
(a) “The Holocene Climate Optimum was a warm period…” – wikipedia
(b) “During the Climatic Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished.” – PhysicalGeography.net
(c) optimum
1. the best or most favorable point, degree, amount, etc., as of temperature, light, and moisture for the growth or reproduction of an organism.http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/optimum
…“co2 lags temp”, “co2 plant food”…
6 x CO2 + 6 x H2O react, in a complex series of light driven steps to produce 1 x C6H12O6 plus 6 x O2.
Is that clear?
…“leftest plot”…
Maggie Thatcher, Royal Society Speech to the Royal Society, 1988. Look it up. Read it.… “climate won’t change”, “climate always changes”, …
Climate always changes. The record shows that. The only people trying to establish a modern myth of static historic temperatures are from your side of the debate.“why trust nasa they faked the moon landings”, “it’s magical moon beans” and the list goes on indeed it seems to be anything but co2.
Strawmen and appeal to ridcule are categorized as logical fallacies. You pack a lot of them into a single paragraph.

coniston: I agree the best thing to come out of this process is the releasing of the code & data to support the claims. I also agree that the burden of proof is always on those making the claim. It always comes down to a balance of probabilities, unless of course we just wait around until 2050 and find out what the climate is then but as most climate scientists would say it’ll be too late to do anything about it if we wait for the worst effects to be felt.

Nigel Leck,
Yours is the very worst kind of spam, based entirely on duplicity. Thoroughly despicable. I’m surprised you would put your name on something so reprehensible, but if that’s your character, so be it. Most of us were raised better than that. A stand-up guy would inform readers of bot replies. That leaves you out, doesn’t it?
Whether or not I’m responding to a spambot here doesn’t matter. Thousands of others will read this post.
I only got as far as your first link, which is wrong: click
Just going by memory [I’m not wasting more time on you], Mars, Pluto, Jupiter and Triton are all warming simultaneously with the Earth. Even a spammer could look it up. Debunking the rest of your presumed authorities would no doubt be as easy.
I suggest you spend some time learning honest science instead of spamming in such a devious way. You can re-learn all the misinformation you’ve been fed by reading the WUWT archives, where both sides of the issues are debated. Or, you can continue to spread misinformation. Your choice.
**
eadler says:
“Prior to the industrial there was only climate change and there are still natural factors that are causing climate change. What has been added to the mix is human caused climate change. This was first described by Arrhenius in 1896 who made the first attempt to compute the effect of doubling CO2 concentration on global temperature.”
You are not thinking straight. The hypothesis of natural climate variability has never been falsified. It is the null hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis, CO2=CAGW, has been repeatedly falsified, not least by the planet itself: adding close to 40% more CO2 should have caused significantly more global warming. What we observe now is the tail end of the planet’s emergence from the LIA, and we are well within the parameters of past natural temperature extremes.
And it is almost becoming a cliche that alarmists cite Arrhenius’ 1896 paper, which assigns a very high climate sensitivity number to CO2. What you deliberately or ignorantly leave out is theft that Arrhenius retracted his 1896 number in his 1906 paper – which gives a substantially lower number than the current IPCC fantasy number. Check on his 1906 paper, and report back.
Next, you say, “What has been added to the mix is human caused climate change.” Whatever are you talking about? Please specifically quantify your assumed fraction of ‘human caused climate change,’ and show how it would be different from the observed natural variability.This graph will help you figure it out. Note that we are currently right in the middle of a “Goldilocks climate”: not too cold, not too hot, but ju-u-u-st right. There is nothing unusual is occurring, except in the cognitive dissonance-afflicted minds of CAGW true believers.
CO2 has done exactly nothing measurable to the climate. If you believe otherwise, then quantify exactly how much is man-made, and how much is natural. Be prepared to face the rigor of the scientific method. That means empirical, observable, testable facts showing how you arrived at your notion. No models – they are only [very inaccurate] tools; they are not evidence. Be prepared to back up the validity of all raw temperature data you use, through independent replication, and to explain why thermometers located in cities show starkly higher temperatures than thermometers in greenfields. You will be the first to provide an un-falsified hypothesis. So if you believe you can do it, then go get ’em, tiger. You will find that the scientific method is a harsh mistress – and that there is a good reason why the alarmist crowd consistently ignores it.
Take your time.

Stefan: we can show burning fossil fuels release CO2, we can show the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, we can measure that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and we also know ( from the isotopes ) this increase is coming from the burning of fossil fuels.

Smokey: maybe you should waste more time because your claim “Mars, Pluto, Jupiter and Triton are all warming simultaneously with the Earth” is wrong and misleading.MARS_01Climate Change: Mars Attacks!!! http://is.gd/cVimMGLOBAL_WARMING_ON_MARSMars is not warming globally http://is.gd/dDRlvGLOBAL_WARMING_OTHER_PLANETS_SOLAR_SYSTEMMars & Jupiter are not warming & anyway sun has recently been cooling slightly http://is.gd/dDRfx

Khwarizmi: The point about cosmic rays is that the correlation breaks down and IF they turn out to be major drivers, then this is worse as when the levels increase again there will be further warmingCOSMIC_RAYS_AND_GLOBAL_WARMINGCosmic rays show no trend over last 30 years & have had little impact on recent global warming http://is.gd/dDRisGLOBAL_WARMING_OTHER_PLANETS_SOLAR_SYSTEMMars & Jupiter are not warming & anyway sun has recently been cooling slightly http://is.gd/dDRfxCOSMIC_RAYS_AND_GLOBAL_WARMING-ADVA detailed look at galactic cosmic rays http://is.gd/fveAF

Ian H says:
November 5, 2010 at 3:32 pm
However you must follow the truth wherever it is to be found. Yes it would be convenient to believe in CAGW and join all those beautiful young people as part of their `movement to save the world’. I see the attraction in it to be sure. But having looked at the evidence I simply can’t do that. I am a skeptic for the same reason I am an atheist – my beliefs are not for sale. And so I find myself hanging out here in the skeptic camp … with EnginEar.
You seem to be an intelligent enough person, so let me just ask …. Why bother arguing about the science? You should realize that both cases , for and against AGW, have at least some potential of being correct. Neither can claim proof… So with that said, why not go towards mitigation? What do we have to lose? Sure it’s expensive but so is the alternative. In addition, you surely know that we need to remove ourselves from fossil fuel use eventually anyway.. Why not take this as an opportunity to support that and help the US become a leader in alternative energy… If its because you are against the policies being proposed, then why not focus on that instead?

Robb876,
Those arguments probably get a big smile at the realclimate echo chamber, but here they’re easy to dismiss. You say:
“…both cases , for and against AGW, have at least some potential of being correct.”
Facts, me boy, we need facts. Not opinions. If you can show that AGW exists separate from natural variability in any measurable, testable way – without resorting to computer models or massaged data – have at it.
Next: “…why not go towards mitigation? What do we have to lose? Sure it’s expensive but so is the alternative.”
The alternative is, at this point, in your imagination. It is pure speculation unsupported by empirical evidence. As for the expense, why not insure yourself against being hit by a flying saucer? Sure it’s expensive, but so is the alternative: hospital bills from the accident.
Next: “…we need to remove ourselves from fossil fuel use eventually anyway.”
The free market takes care of things like that very efficiently, and without a crippling new bureaucracy that will only grow larger over time.
Finally, the world is interconnected and new technologies are adopted practically overnight. For the US to become a leader in alternative energy – without losing that leadership position – requires that the government must get out of the way, instead of over-regulating every aspect of society.
I’ve run a business for most of my adult life. I can tell you’ve never had to meet a payroll. Neither have most in Congress, nor those in this Administration. They assume they understand how the real world works. But they haven’t a clue.

Ian H: I’m not taking the easy route and I’m quite happy to go against the consensus view point when I can’t see the evidence.So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth. … Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. … It’s not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong.

Robb876 says:
November 5, 2010 at 8:29 pm
You seem to be an intelligent enough person, so let me just ask …. Why bother arguing about the science? You should realize that both cases , for and against AGW, have at least some potential of being correct. Neither can claim proof… So with that said, why not go towards mitigation? What do we have to lose? Sure it’s expensive but so is the alternative. In addition, you surely know that we need to remove ourselves from fossil fuel use eventually anyway.. Why not take this as an opportunity to support that and help the US become a leader in alternative energy… If its because you are against the policies being proposed, then why not focus on that instead?

Why BOTHER?!!! You don’t care what the truth is? You just want people to do what you want and this is a convenient excuse? You are happy to lie about it and sell the message that global warming is a serious problem when you’ve just admitted there is no evidence of that?
If you want to become a leader in alternative energy – go right ahead. Nothing is stopping you, except perhaps the laws of physics. I wish you well. But don’t lie to the world and sell a message of fear in order to do it. Don’t destroy the belief that people have in rationality and science.
What do we have to lose? Don’t you think you should know the negative effects of the policies you are advocating? Cutting CO_2 is far from painless. You are talking about making a very significant cut to the standard of living of most of the worlds population! You are talking about massive distortions to the world economy – an economic disruption of the livelihood of billions. You are talking about blocking the development of the underdeveloped, taxing the developed world into poverty, and possibly killing millions of people with artificially induced famines as food producing agricultural land is diverted to the production of fuel and energy. And you want to do this on a whim based on a lie?
Mitigate what? OK – the world has gotten warmer. I’ll agree with that. It is also gotten greener and wetter. Now where is the damage that this has caused. Point to it. Surely if warming was such a problem we’d at least see SOME negative effects by now. Show me the beginnings of this massive problem that we must take such DRASTIC measures to avoid? The sahara … oops … no that has gotten a lot greener. Agricultural production … opps no – that has gone up considerably as the climate becomes more benign and increased CO_2 levels have encouraged faster plant growth. Where is the problem? The world has been warmer than this in the past – a lot warmer. And no disasters followed. Indeed a warmer world is more hospitable for life.
The only disasters I foresee in the future are those caused by efforts to `mitigate’ a non-existent problem. You want the world to take seriously dangerous medicine for an illness it doesn’t have. So no – I’ll not join your crusade, because it is wrong and it is a lie.

Ian H says:
November 5, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Wow, where should I start with this one… First of all I never said there wasnt any “evidence” of AGW, what i said was that neither side had proof, meaning that neither could show 100% proof. I believe there is plenty of evidence for AGW, and i also believe there is evidence to suggest it might not be as bad as some claim or that maybe its not man made. I guess you could say im not convinced of the dangers.
Anyway, secondly.. How are the laws of physics stopping alternative energy? And we wont get into the acusations of lies, because we both know that lies apply to both sides…
(By this point im starting to wonder if your post really applies to my post)…. You should take note that I have not supported any policy for implementing energy policies. In fact i tried to lead the argument into policy, and away from the science. And where does this “death and destruction” to the world if alternative energy is implemented come from? Ive heard this many times skeptics and i just dont get it. Surely you realize that moving to alternative energy sources dosent mean that one day we just shut down coal, etc without a suitable energy replacement already in place. And if that were in fact some sick policy, im surely not in favor of it and i doubt you will find someone who is. And to to prevent you from mentioning it, the article posted here the other day regarding coal plants being shut down in the UK, dosent mean they are going to leave people in the dark, regardless of what was implied. Obviously they will either tax or have back up energy before that happens… And no i dont support this method either.
We shouldnt necessarily be seeing negative effects by now… You need to understand that we are just entering this “warming phase” and we have only seen a very small rise in temps. I would expect to see minor or no changes at this point. If GW is a problem, and please note that i said “if”, I wouldnt expect it to get bad for many decades. Probably not in your lifetime… So your point on crops…. Sure some may do better, and some will do worse. There are already reports on crop yields reducing due to warming, just as there are for them gaining.. Which way is it going to go overall? Again, dont look at todays findings, because they dont mean much.
Ok, sure the world was warmer than this in the past, but how does that argument apply when “in the past” there wasnt 6 billion people to feed? How does that argument make sense, please explain that one to me because again, its mentioned a lot..
So at any rate, the “medicine” being bad, is just your perspective on what is in store and definately not a fact. Which brings me back to my original point… If its the fix that has you scared, argure that and not if global warming is good or bad fo rpeople… because you surely dont have any proof of that it is, except for what might be happening today. But then again, we dont look at just today when we talk about climate impacts, do we?
And if you want to use analogies to discuss this… How about if 1000 astronomers told you a meterorite was going to hit your house soon, and 1000 journalists and engineers said it wasnt, or that if it did it wasnt going to be bad… What would you do? Spend the money to move your family, or risk losing them because of what a bunch of unqualified people said…

Smokey says:
November 5, 2010 at 8:59 pm
OK, yours is much easier Smokey… I agree, lets let the free market take over alternative energy.. I dont support the cap and trade effort, etc but i would rather see that than an effort to kill alternative energy (which im not implying you support).
As far as evidence… Heres the way i look at it.
1) The earth is getting warmer
2) Man is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, which we all know is a GHG. And we all know that a GHG will in fact cause some element of warming (we might not admit that, but we all know if will to some level).
3) Its late and im done with this… but you know the rest…. Bottom line is we are completely throwing the carbon cycle off balance… if you want to wait for proof, your probably going to wait forever becasue someone will always complain.

Ah well Smokey as you once observed, Do Not Feed the Trolls.
Mind you the ones we get here are reasonably polite if verbose.
But think on. If a chatbot on side could engage with a chatbot on the other side and Twitter endlessly between themselves, and the twittering grows as further chatbots appear and become engaged, talk about the battle of the machines, is it not possible to direct the trolls to engage in that wonderfully meaningless debate. Where they will be perfectly at home.
I find it a hugely entertaining idea, all those mechanicals forever quoting and citing to each other about nothing at all.
And leaving serious people to talk freely amongst themselves and have a genuine debate.
A pipe dream I suppose. Ah well time to put another log on the fire and refill the glass. And ponder some more.
Kindest Regards.

Nigel Leck says:
November 5, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Ian H: This is what I have for the error in the IPCC report about the Himalayan glacier by 2035. That was an error, it was admitted and corrects are made. That’s how science works. It is untrue to infer that glaciers are not melting
IPCC_HIMALAYAN_GLACIER_2035_PREDICTION Glaciers are in rapid retreat worldwide,despite 1 error in 1 paragraph in a 1000 page IPCC report http://is.gd/dDU4U

When people lie, they try to make the lie as true as possible. They tell a lie that is 95% true. That way the lie can always be denied. Children tell outright lies. When we grow up we learn to make them subtle, having discovered as children that the ouright lies are easily found out. Adults tell subtle lies that are hard to detect, but which still confer an advantage. That’s life. So one has to be on the lookout for subtle lies.
“That was an error, it was admitted and corrects are made. That’s how science works.” is one of those sorts of lies. As a statement it suggest and gives a certain impression of honesty and transparency. But what does this leave out? What subtle thing does it leave out which would alter the impression?
“Pachauri calls Indian govt. report on melting Himalayan glaciers as “voodoo science””source
Why was Pachauri’s reaction so strong? Why did he attack, rather than have things checked? Can the bot answer that?
Also, the subtle lying implied with the statement, “1 error in 1 paragraph in a 1000 page IPCC report”. So if I told an untruth to someone, I could later defend it by saying, “I spoke 25,000 words that day to 50 people over 16 hours, and in that I spoke only one sentence that was in error, a mere 25 words out of 25,000”
Somebody should get Judge Judy or anyone who pays attention to what they hear, onto this.
We know lying and spin and damage control when we hear it. The question is, why can’t you hear it? People are so eager to spin skeptical questioning as “big oil shills, crackpots and outsiders”, and yet they pay so little attention to their own spin.
The hilarious part is when there people doing this spinning, “1 error in a 1000 page report” then claim they are being very objective and rational. They don’t even know themselves that they are lying and spinning and distorting things. Ha ha ha.

Why should we have to come up with new arguments. The bot never does:) If I answer its more for the readers of the hash tags I post under. And sorry.. they dont buy what the bot sells. So again.. is the bot really doing the creator a service? I think not.

robb876 says:
November 5, 2010 at 10:43 pm
“2) Man is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, which we all know is a GHG. And we all know that a GHG will in fact cause some element of warming (we might not admit that, but we all know if will to some level).”
No, i don’t *know* that. The natural long term atmosphere temperature oscillations seem to be driven by the oceans, and the oceans seem to be driven by short wave solar radiation, not IR or LWIR.
So the atmosphere is the end of the chain. Like the tail of a dog. When you add a little CO2 to the atmosphere, it will just make it oscillate in a slightly different way. And there are negative feedbacks – albedo, SB law, maybe Miskolczi’s constant optical thickness – so it is very very far from “known” that adding CO2 will have a warming effect at current concentrations.
Personally, i think the alleged CO2 warming signal is not detectable in the weather noise.

@Nigel
Regarding a few of the “Sun xxxx warming/cooling” answers – those seem all to be about TSI. Feel free to hang out here (and maybe on the solarcycle24 forum) for a while and you’ll find references to all the papers about TSI not being the only way the sun affects (indeed effects) the earth 😉
regards,
Troed

DirkH says:
Fancy…. Much better than “but it was warmer in the past”.
Anyway, maybe your right. Co2 might be too insignificant in relation to the other drivers. But ocean currents, while surely more powerful than co2, cannot explain today’s warming. The oscillations you refer to are not new and they would be driven by the sun in terms of their warming potential… The sun, as far as I know, has been factored out. Now I understand that the oscillations are causing changes, warming trends, etc… But only to the extent that they always have. Along with those routine oscillations, we are seeing a lot of record temps beginning to pile in a short time frame leading me to believe something else is at work as well.

Smokey Says,
“eadler says:
“Prior to the industrial there was only climate change and there are still natural factors that are causing climate change. What has been added to the mix is human caused climate change. This was first described by Arrhenius in 1896 who made the first attempt to compute the effect of doubling CO2 concentration on global temperature.
“You are not thinking straight. The hypothesis of natural climate variability has never been falsified. It is the null hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis, CO2=CAGW, has been repeatedly falsified, not least by the planet itself: adding close to 40% more CO2 should have caused significantly more global warming. What we observe now is the tail end of the planet’s emergence from the LIA, and we are well within the parameters of past natural temperature extremes.”
The only way to determine the effect of CO2 against the background of natural variability is to use model simulations. The only simulations I am familiar with show that the behavior of global temperatures cannot be accounted for without CO2, and that CO2 accounts for most of the temperature increase we have seen in the past 30 years.
“And it is almost becoming a cliche that alarmists cite Arrhenius’ 1896 paper, which assigns a very high climate sensitivity number to CO2. What you deliberately or ignorantly leave out is theft that Arrhenius retracted his 1896 number in his 1906 paper – which gives a substantially lower number than the current IPCC fantasy number. Check on his 1906 paper, and report back.”
The value that Arrhenius found for sensitivity in various papers is not relevant to my point. If there is a paper written in 1906 that shows a smaller climate sensitivity than his 1896 paper, I haven’t seen it. If you have a link to a reliable source, then you can back up your statement, but it proves nothing.
“Next, you say, “What has been added to the mix is human caused climate change.” Whatever are you talking about? Please specifically quantify your assumed fraction of ‘human caused climate change,’ and show how it would be different from the observed natural variability.
“This graph will help you figure it out. Note that we are currently right in the middle of a “Goldilocks climate”: not too cold, not too hot, but ju-u-u-st right. There is nothing unusual is occurring, except in the cognitive dissonance-afflicted minds of CAGW true believers.
“CO2 has done exactly nothing measurable to the climate. If you believe otherwise, then quantify exactly how much is man-made, and how much is natural. Be prepared to face the rigor of the scientific method. That means empirical, observable, testable facts showing how you arrived at your notion. No models – they are only [very inaccurate] tools; they are not evidence. Be prepared to back up the validity of all raw temperature data you use, through independent replication, and to explain why thermometers located in cities show starkly higher temperatures than thermometers in greenfields. You will be the first to provide an un-falsified hypothesis. So if you believe you can do it, then go get ‘em, tiger. You will find that the scientific method is a harsh mistress – and that there is a good reason why the alarmist crowd consistently ignores it.
Take your time.”
Here is the link which answers the nonsense you have spouted above once more.http://wwwskepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm
Your Vostok graph of temperature in recent times is in error. It doesn’t even show the increase in temperature we have observed in the last century, which is 0.7C. It should be visible on the scale of the graph. It may be that the ice cores cannot show this level of detail, or that the correct data was omitted . Can you explain this obvious problem?
The fact that we like our climate today doesn’t show that the increase in CO2 and other GHG’s is not going to make the earth get warmer, on average, and create more extreme climate events in the future due to increases in average global temperature.
Your attempts to show that there is no valid evidence in favor of AGW have utterly failed.

DirkH says:
November 6, 2010 at 3:11 am
“robb876 says:
November 5, 2010 at 10:43 pm
“2) Man is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, which we all know is a GHG. And we all know that a GHG will in fact cause some element of warming (we might not admit that, but we all know if will to some level).”
No, i don’t *know* that. The natural long term atmosphere temperature oscillations seem to be driven by the oceans, and the oceans seem to be driven by short wave solar radiation, not IR or LWIR.
So the atmosphere is the end of the chain. Like the tail of a dog. When you add a little CO2 to the atmosphere, it will just make it oscillate in a slightly different way. And there are negative feedbacks – albedo, SB law, maybe Miskolczi’s constant optical thickness – so it is very very far from “known” that adding CO2 will have a warming effect at current concentrations.
Personally, i think the alleged CO2 warming signal is not detectable in the weather noise.”
Your personal opinion is not based on fact. Climate models can detect the CO2 warming signal very clearly. Look at the three graphs on this web page.http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm
I may not be a bot, but it took very little work to reply to your post.REPLY: You may not be a bot, but your do appear to have a terminal case of this. – Anthony

#
#
“Troed Sångberg says:
November 6, 2010 at 3:41 am
@Nigel
Regarding a few of the “Sun xxxx warming/cooling” answers – those seem all to be about TSI. Feel free to hang out here (and maybe on the solarcycle24 forum) for a while and you’ll find references to all the papers about TSI not being the only way the sun affects (indeed effects) the earth 😉
regards,
Troed”
Since you are familiar with this, could you be more specific about the other solar mechanisms that could be related to global warming? Why should Leck have to waste his time fishing around in the solar cycle 24 web site?
Variations in Cosmic rays have been eliminated as a factor, since they have simply oscillated, and could not be causing an increase in global warming. In addition, if cosmic rays impacted cloudiness, this would show up more in the high latitudes than in the low latitudes. This is not observed.http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-detailed-look-at-galactic-cosmic-rays.htmlhttp://www.skepticalscience.com/Do-cosmic-rays-cause-clouds.htmlREPLY: Why not put some effort into this instead of link-regurgitating the SS website? That site has a strong bias, if you want to be effective, reference studies. – Anthony

Smokey says:
“Facts, me boy, we need facts. Not opinions. If you can show that AGW exists separate from natural variability in any measurable, testable way – without resorting to computer models or massaged data – have at it.”
Why are computers, and correction of errors in temperature data a no-no? Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate. They are a great tool and the only way to study weather and climate. Also it is clear that temperature data needs correction due to changes in instruments and modifications in the structures around the location of the equipment.
Your demand that such practices are illegitimate, when they are endorsed by climate scientists, would appear to be a way to rationalize you bias against the idea, and wave away the evidence that it exists and has been caused by GHG’s. It is a pretty transparent ruse. That way you don’t have to deal with any of the data and arguments that 97% of climate scientists accept.
It seems like a cop out to avoid cognitive dissonance.

a jones,
Thanks for your comment. eadler’s upside down world view is evidenced by his infatuated belief that the disingenuously named “skeptical” science blog is anything but climate alarmism written by a cartoonist. It is a waste of time reading that crap, and I have better uses for my time – like keeping up to date on reality by reading WUWT.
What eadler clearly does not ‘get’ is the scientific method. No matter how many times it is pointed out that skeptics have nothing to prove, alarmists always demand that skeptics must prove a negative. In eadler’s topsy-turvy world, our normal climate is something portending imminent disaster. That belief is not based on evidence, because there is zero evidence showing that the current climate is unusual. It is simply a belief system, no different than Mrs Keech’s followers believing in flying saucers because of her psychic visions.
The onus is completely on the alarmist contingent to support their CO2=CAGW hypothesis by showing that today’s temperatures are anything out of the ordinary. But eadler fails to show anything of the sort, and falls back on the impotent tactic of trying to put the burden on scientific skeptics – the only honest type of scientist. The planet’s temperature is completely within its past parameters, and there is no empirical evidence showing runaway anything. So his belief in impending doom takes the place of rational science.
A hypothesis has been proposed: that increased CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. That hypothesis has been repeatedly debunked. There is zero evidence showing that the planet’s temperature is outside of its past parameters. The temperature is completely normal. The onus is upon the alarmist crowd to show that is not the case, and as we know they have consistently failed.
One of the central tests of AGW is the prediction of a tropospheric hot spot — which never appeared, once again falsifying the AGW scare. As Albert Einstein noted, all it takes is one fact to falsify a hypothesis. But hey, who needs the scientific method, when true belief is so much more comfortable?
As Craig Loehle pointed out, Mann ’08 is the only one showing a huge temperature spike in recent decades — which goes away if you drop the upside-down Tiljander sediment proxies and the stripbark trees. Because Mann [deliberately] used an upside-down proxy to support his Hokey Stick, he has become the laughingstock of the alarmist crowd; quite a feat. The amazing fact that acolytes like eadler still believe in the fantasy that a tiny trace gas controls the world’s climate makes them part of the entertainment. Some folks will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous. It’s cognitive dissonance, and it is apparently incurable short of an epiphany.

I should point out once again that skeptics are immune from Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, because skeptics are simply questioning the assertions of those promoting the CAGW conjecture. That makes eadler’s claim nothing but psychological projection: projecting his own faults onto others; a common delusion typical of the alarmist crowd.
Adler says, “Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate. They are a great tool and the only way to study weather and climate.”
Funny. Climate models are extremely inaccurate. Out of 32 model runs cited here, exactly one was accurate, while 27 were wrong, and 4 are questionable.
Models are not evidence, they are only tools. And they are not very good tools, because they cannot predict the future climate. Gravy train scientists have resorted to models, because the real world gives them answers inconsistent with their lucrative scare story. Models are their crutch, enabling them to avoid the scientific method.
Believing in models when the real world gives contrary results is a fool’s game. No credible person accepts the output of a GCM over the real world, as “skeptical” science does. It is an unintentional admission of failure.

eadler says:
Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate.

This is the big problem. Engineers design a bridge using computer models, and when it is built, some unforeseen behaviour manifests itself under certain conditions. The bridge cost £18 million, and after its encounter with reality, another £5 million to fix. The bridge’s engineers are one of the biggest and best and most prestigious engineering companies in the world.
So yes, the very best people use models. And, they are still only models. You will never know beforehand if your model is right, approximate, or useless. Their methods worked for a lot of other stuff they built — but it didn’t work for this one.
You don’t know until you test. How do you test a climate model prediction for the year 2050? You wait until 2050. That’s how you test it. Not 2010, nor hindcast back to 1990, you test a 2050 prediction in 2050. You build the bridge you designed. Not some similar bridge, not some other thing you did before that was a bit different. This one is the one you test. The 2050 prediction; that you test in 2050.
Now it is fine that climatologists use computer models. You can never claim though that, using computer models, the debate is “settled” and “irrefutable”. You just can’t.
No matter how good and expert ARUP’s model was for that bridge — remember they had the confidence to build it at the cost of millions in a high profile project in the nation’s capital — reality itself refuted it.
And we’re only talking a bridge here. How’s that supposed to compare to global climate??
You cannot claim that climate predictions are irrefutable. AGW is a prediction (or wait, a set of scenarios… which we treat as as if they will most likely happen… ie. a prediction.) That is easy to refute. All you say is, they don’t know that it is most likely to happen.

In a previous post, I wrote:
“Variations in Cosmic rays have been eliminated as a factor, since they have simply oscillated, and could not be causing an increase in global warming. In addition, if cosmic rays impacted cloudiness, this would show up more in the high latitudes than in the low latitudes. This is not observed.
Anthony Watts replied,
“REPLY: Why not put some effort into this instead of link-regurgitating the SS? That site has a strong bias, if you want to be effective, reference studies. – Anthony”
If you had clicked on the first link, you would see 17 references to published literature. In the case of the second link, it constitutes a back and forth discussion between Shaviv a scientist who published articles which promote a cosmic ray theory of global warming, and Terry Sloan who published an article which shows that cosmic rays do not appear to be a contributor to cloudiness, which varies with solar cycles.
Even if you choose to label the site biased, rather than accurate, which is a characterization I prefer, the level of scientific discussion there is on an elevated plane, with plenty of graphs and references to scientific literature on both sides of the issues that are being discussed.
I don’t see a need to reproduce what is done so well in my post with a copy and paste, when anyone can click on the link and read it.
If there is a glaring error, omission or a distortion on the links that I have supplied, I would like to know what they are. I am above all interested in finding the truth about whether it is likely that cosmic rays are a factor in creating clouds. I am willing to listen to anyone who has something substantive to say, but I don’t credit a dismissal of the site as “biased” as substantive scientific argument.

Smokey says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:06 am
“I should point out once again that skeptics are immune from Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, because skeptics are simply questioning the assertions of those promoting the CAGW conjecture. That makes eadler’s claim nothing but psychological projection: projecting his own faults onto others; a common delusion typical of the alarmist crowd.”
Smokey,
Skeptics are not immune from the problem of Cognitive Dissonance. The low level of fallacious arguments they use show that they are suffering from this.
In this case, the argument that models are no good in general, is an example. You used a single instance of human error in the design of a bridge as a claim that somehow the problem was the use of a computer program. Then you claim that an instance of an error is somehow proof that no computer is trustworthy.
In fact, all of human society is based on a certain level of trust. It would fall apart if we believed that every statement by anyone we met was in error because someone made a mistake once, or that everyone is a liar and leave it at that.
“Adler says, “Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate. They are a great tool and the only way to study weather and climate.”
Funny. Climate models are extremely inaccurate. Out of 32 model runs cited here, exactly one was accurate, while 27 were wrong, and 4 are questionable.”\
Here is an answer from the skeptical science web page on models:A common argument heard is “scientists can’t even predict the weather next week – how can they predict the climate years from now”. This betrays a misunderstanding of the difference between weather, which is chaotic and unpredictable, and climate which is weather averaged out over time. While you can’t predict with certainty whether a coin will land heads or tails, you can predict the statistical results of a large number of coin tosses. In weather terms, you can’t predict the exact route a storm will take but the average temperature and precipitation over the whole region is the same regardless of the route.
“Models are not evidence, they are only tools. And they are not very good tools, because they cannot predict the future climate. Gravy train scientists have resorted to models, because the real world gives them answers inconsistent with their lucrative scare story. Models are their crutch, enabling them to avoid the scientific method.
Believing in models when the real world gives contrary results is a fool’s game. No credible person accepts the output of a GCM over the real world, as “skeptical” science does. It is an unintentional admission of failure.”
This argument is nonsense. There is no way to test the various influences on climate without using models. The real world cannot show anything about causes of climate change without models. To claim that the scientific method is avoided by the use of model is total nonsense to anyone who understands science.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling
Model
“A scientific model seeks to represent empirical objects, phenomena, and physical processes in a logical and objective way. All models are in simulacra, that is, simplified reflections of reality, but despite their inherent falsity, they are nevertheless extremely useful [1]. Building and disputing models is fundamental to the scientific enterprise. Complete and true representation may be impossible (see non-representational theory), but scientific debate often concerns which is the better model for a given task, such as the most accurate climate model for seasonal forecasting[2].'”
I predict that cognitive dissonance will impel you to question the source I have used on scientific modelling. However you will not present any authoritative source to dispute it, just produce more invective.
From what you have written above, it seems to me you believe that any action to fight global warming is going to hurt the profitibability of your business. You will use any argument no matter how ridden with logical fallacies, and factual errors, which absolves you of the need to discuss specifics.

Stefan says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:51 am
” eadler says:
Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate.
This is the big problem. Engineers design a bridge using computer models, and when it is built, some unforeseen behaviour manifests itself under certain conditions. The bridge cost £18 million, and after its encounter with reality, another £5 million to fix. The bridge’s engineers are one of the biggest and best and most prestigious engineering companies in the world.
So yes, the very best people use models. And, they are still only models. You will never know beforehand if your model is right, approximate, or useless. Their methods worked for a lot of other stuff they built — but it didn’t work for this one.”
This is not an appropriate analogy. The climate is not analogous to a new type of bridge. We are not designing a new climate. The elements of climate and the forces that dominate it have always been in existence and even the newest human modifications of the earth have been in existence for long enough to have been studied.
“You don’t know until you test. How do you test a climate model prediction for the year 2050? You wait until 2050. That’s how you test it. Not 2010, nor hindcast back to 1990, you test a 2050 prediction in 2050. You build the bridge you designed. Not some similar bridge, not some other thing you did before that was a bit different. This one is the one you test. The 2050 prediction; that you test in 2050.”
This is not correct. Hindcasts are a valid method of testing models and our understanding of how the forces in existence in the past have affected climate. What we will see in 2050 is not an essentially untested new type of bridge.
“Now it is fine that climatologists use computer models. You can never claim though that, using computer models, the debate is “settled” and “irrefutable”. You just can’t.
No matter how good and expert ARUP’s model was for that bridge — remember they had the confidence to build it at the cost of millions in a high profile project in the nation’s capital — reality itself refuted it.
And we’re only talking a bridge here. How’s that supposed to compare to global climate??
You cannot claim that climate predictions are irrefutable. AGW is a prediction (or wait, a set of scenarios… which we treat as as if they will most likely happen… ie. a prediction.) That is easy to refute. All you say is, they don’t know that it is most likely to happen.”
I don’t claim the predictions are irrefutable. I do claim that the models, since they have done a good job on hindcasts are a reasonable guide. We are not building a totally unprecedented model of bridge. The future climate is a modification of what we have already seen in the past.

eadler says:
November 6, 2010 at 9:29 am
“Why are computers, and correction of errors in temperature data a no-no? Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate. They are a great tool and the only way to study weather and climate. ”
The current computer models can’t even get the average distribution of cloudiness by latitude right. They model something, but not the climate of planet Earth. They are not a great tool but an expensive way of fantasizing.
They might become useful (still not great, but useful) when they manage to bring down the raster size to sub km ranges and model the physics right instead of guessing (They call this guessing “parameterizing” but it’s still guessing; for instance, the aerosol forcing is a guess; tuned in such a way that the temperature curve matches the past observations. Which is still guessing and curve-fitting and nothing more.)
The current computer models are in no way better than a casino.

eadler says:
November 6, 2010 at 1:29 pm
” The elements of climate and the forces that dominate it have always been in existence and even the newest human modifications of the earth have been in existence for long enough to have been studied. ”
Are you the twitterbot? If you were human, you might have been paying attention – the climatologists still don’t know whether aerosols have a net positive or negative forcing. And that’s one of many holes in the billion-dollar travesty called climate science.
Tell your master that you need an upgrade of your database. Now off you go, bot.

DirkH says:
November 6, 2010 at 1:54 pm
“eadler says:
November 6, 2010 at 9:29 am
“Why are computers, and correction of errors in temperature data a no-no? Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate. They are a great tool and the only way to study weather and climate. ”
The current computer models can’t even get the average distribution of cloudiness by latitude right. They model something, but not the climate of planet Earth. They are not a great tool but an expensive way of fantasizing.
They might become useful (still not great, but useful) when they manage to bring down the raster size to sub km ranges and model the physics right instead of guessing (They call this guessing “parameterizing” but it’s still guessing; for instance, the aerosol forcing is a guess; tuned in such a way that the temperature curve matches the past observations. Which is still guessing and curve-fitting and nothing more.)
The current computer models are in no way better than a casino.”
There is no way to model clouds exactly from first principles of physics. It is the primary source of uncertainty in climate models depending on the magnitude and sign of the effective feedback. This is known and recognized by climate scientists. Uncertainty is no excuse for totally ignoring the results of climate models. We have to look at the range of the estimates and act accordingly. If the feedback from clouds is positive, global warming will be worse than thought.http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rind_02/
“NASA has launched several satellites such as CloudSat and Calipso with the goal of better understanding cloud formulations. This year also represents the International Polar Year (IPY) organized through the International Council for Science and the World Meteorological Organization; it is aimed at improving our understanding of polar processes in both the Arctic and Antarctic. The hope is that efforts such as these will lead to gradual improvement in our understanding of climate sensitivity at low and high latitudes, and therefore a better ability to predict the likely consequences of climate warming. Until this is achieved, it will be hard to be specific about the societal impacts of future greenhouse gas emissions, an uncertainty that, it can be argued, should make us even more cautious about disturbing the system. ”
In addition to cloud feedbacks there are other phenomena that cause positive feedback that has not be included in the models, such as release of methane:http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/04/science-nsf-tundra-permafrost-methane-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-venting/

“REPLY: Why not put some effort into this instead of link-regurgitating the SS? That site has a strong bias, if you want to be effective, reference studies. – Anthony”
Oh, that’s rich… are you seriously saying wattsupwiththat is impartial ? LOL
[Reply – all reasonable views are welcome here and debate is encouraged; references back up views and enhance debate that is what you are being encouraged to provide ~jove, mod]

eadler says:
Computer models are the only way to understand and project the future of climate.
stefan says:
This is the big problem. Engineers design a bridge using computer models, and when it is built, some unforeseen behaviour manifests itself under certain conditions. The bridge cost £18 million, and after its encounter with reality, another £5 million to fix. The bridge’s engineers are one of the biggest and best and most prestigious engineering companies in the world.
eadler says:
This is not an appropriate analogy. The climate is not analogous to a new type of bridge. We are not designing a new climate. The elements of climate and the forces that dominate it have always been in existence and even the newest human modifications of the earth have been in existence for long enough to have been studied.
…
Hindcasts are a valid method of testing models and our understanding of how the forces in existence in the past have affected climate. What we will see in 2050 is not an essentially untested new type of bridge.

We can’t get round this by simply characterising the bridge as “novel, new, untested” and meanwhile the climate as “always been in existence” with its “forces understood” as “evidenced by hindcasts”.
What do you think those engineers were doing? Inventing fantasies? The bridge is a suspension bridge, which failed due to positive feedback resonance. Is this new?? No! Everyone has heard of the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster. So, watch out for feedbacks which you don’t understand! Since 1940 engineers KNOW to watch out for this stuff. And in London one of the best firms built a suspension bridge that resonated in a way they didn’t anticipate. EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW FROM LONG EXPERIENCE TO WATCH OUT FOR THIS. And what do you think they were using to model it? Magic? No, real physics!
But that’s the problem with modelling systems which may be at the effect of feedbacks. Look, I’m just a layman. It is obvious to me. What am I missing? Look, A hundred and eighty years since the invention of the suspension bridge, over forty five years since a spectacular suspension bridge disaster involving feedbacks, the best engineers in the world build a bridge that fails due to … feedbacks. And the particular vibration mode, in this case laterally, was also experienced in bridges back in the seventies. So even the failure mode is not unknown. Even if you claim the design was “new” and “novel”, why would any engineer BUILD it if they DIDN’T BELIEVE THAT THEY UNDERSTOOD IT?
Naturally, they thought they understood it, or they wouldn’t have built the thing. Engineers know about feedbacks on bridges: wind, people walking, vehicles. They know about this stuff. The problem here was, the source of the feedback was something very small and unnoticed. As a person walks, taking steps left, right, left, right, their centre of gravity of their body mass sways slightly from side to side. That was the source of the “forcing” that became a positive feedback. Remember, it is still a suspension bridge, with people waking on it. Is that so “novel” ? And even if you claim it is so novel as to be highly risky, why then would they have built it if they didn’t believe that they understood it???
How is this not a sobering lesson for climate models? You claim there is only “one climate”, but people are still arguing about the magnitude and extent of the MWP, they are still arguing about the role of clouds, they are still arguing about all this stuff because there just isn’t a lot of data. There isn’t “one climate” because the data is sparse and fragmented and covers different cycles operating at small and huge timescales. We have a tiny amount of data about a huge system.
To figure out what had gone wrong, ARUP had to run tests with different numbers of people walking over the bridge, doing things like walking and then turning back and so on. “We wrote the equivalent of three or four PhDs in a few weeks,” one Arup engineer said.
“there was no alternative: they had to get a lot of people to walk over it, all at once, and watch very carefully”
There’s no alternative to reality.

eadler says:
I do claim that the models, since they have done a good job on hindcasts are a reasonable guide. We are not building a totally unprecedented model of bridge. The future climate is a modification of what we have already seen in the past.

You’ve simply chosen to believe that you understand the modified future climate.
And incidentally, you’ve introduced two climates: the past non man influenced one, and the future man influenced one (which is an “entirely new design”), and you claim to understand them both. The fact is you don’t have multiple Earths to test with.
Medical Researchers, in the end they have to test on real people. Years ago a medical trial went wrong and the drug, which had tested fine in animals, caused an immediate, grotesque, painful, terminal reaction in people. The doctors, who must have felt terrible, said, “nobody could have known before we tested”. Animal experiments are supposed to be a reasonable guide, that’s why they do them.
You don’t have multiple Earths to test with. That’s why they do computer models. But they are not even animal tests. And when they do run tests on humans, they don’t know if a reaction is because of the drug or because of something else. It takes a lot of comparisons across many patients to figure that out. But we only have one Earth. The temperature went up a little, and everyone claims they know why. Really? That’s what we’re supposed to believe, when multiple examples from all other areas of life show from real experience that things are not so easy?

Anthony, as you correctly worked out my list of arguments and answers have been sourced from skeptical science.
Which of these arguments are in dispute and do you have the peer reviewed research which refusing these answers ?
[Reply – if you can demonstrate you are genuinely interested in why so many of us are skeptical and you want to get a more balanced view of the science, I am sure some of the commenters would be only too happy to point to some of the references you are asking for and discuss them. Be aware there is no quick answer to your question due to the volume of material that counters the arguments. If you are simply seeking to waste time here and score points, you will be ignored. Try asking one question for starters – don’t just refer to the whole list ~ jove, mod]

Jove: I would be extremely interested if some or any of these arguments could be shown to be false. I mean you’ll need to do a little better than “Leck is also an atheist..” but seriously if the current best scientific understanding is counter to any of these arguments then I would disable those arguments and if enough were shown to be false I would disable the bot and publicly apologize. There’s a challenge for you or anyone who is up to it.
PS. Anomalies a rule does not make. So if ten peer-reviewed papers say one thing and one says the opposite, sorry I’m going with the ten unless you can give good cause.
[Reply – for a start define ‘shown to be false’; define what you will accept as ‘current best scientific understanding’ ~ jove, mod]

eadler says:
There is no way to model clouds exactly from first principles of physics. It is the primary source of uncertainty in climate models depending on the magnitude and sign of the effective feedback. This is known and recognized by climate scientists. Uncertainty is no excuse for totally ignoring the results of climate models. We have to look at the range of the estimates and act accordingly. If the feedback from clouds is positive, global warming will be worse than thought.

You seem to be saying that, because we don’t understand well the feedbacks, the possible outcomes are much more dramatic, and therefore we should take the models more seriously!
By that reasoning, there is an incentive to REMOVE knowledge from models, and make the models more vague, because then they can provide an even wider range of possible outcomes, more dramatic outcomes, an ice age by Tuesday or boiling by Wednesday, and thus, faced with such cataclysms, we’ll need to really take the models even more seriously. (And actually this would be a safeguard against over confidence in assuming that we know what we know. The models should reach into the extremes and not be constrained by what modellers think is “reasonable”).
If we think the climate is very sensitive, then the only course of action is adaptation and building backup systems into existing society. There is no point trying to limit CO2 emissions because, in a sensitive climate, something else could trigger a cataclysm anyway.
(And there is no point arguing that we have to act on CO2 because we “know” about CO2, for in a sensitive climate, the unknown unknowns become of much greater importance. Do you see what I mean? If the system is sensitive, then it is very vulnerable to random unknown effects. And as these are everywhere, the system will change in response to them. A sensitive climate means the only recourse is adaptation. We need working cheap backups for society and infrastructure.)

Nigel Leck says:
November 7, 2010 at 3:58 am
“Jove: I would be extremely interested if some or any of these arguments could be shown to be false. […]”
Just curious – are you the botmeister or are you one of his creations? You enarly sound like a human.

Nigel Leck says:
PS. Anomalies a rule does not make. So if ten peer-reviewed papers say one thing and one says the opposite, sorry I’m going with the ten unless you can give good cause.

That’s just your own judgement where you treat preferentially the group rather than the individual. I’ve often wondered why some people tend to do this, whilst others tend to prefer individuals. Maybe it is some mythical belief about “lone hero” or “the goodness of people coming together”. These are just opposites. There are no guarantees, nor likelyhoods, of one being more right than the other. People just have a bias. It may be die to life experience. If your experience of groups is good, you might learn to trust groups. If your experience of them is that, the whole nation was full of bright people who were all nonetheless defenders of racism, like Apartheid, then perhaps you grow up believing not to trust groups inherently. I’m just saying, you’ve made a personal and biased assumption. Just be aware you’ve made it.

Nigel Leck says:
November 7, 2010 at 3:58 am
The point of the debate about climate is that we have evidence for and evidence against.
The skeptic argument is that the ‘consensus view’ (IPCC) overplays the certainty of the science that is ‘for’. Also consider that you are asking for skeptics to prove that the warming arguements are false when equally they cannot be ‘proven’ as true.
I fervently believed the warmist view and trusted the science untill I started to look at the science myself. Once I looked at the (warming) arguement and (skeptic) counter argument myself, I found I could no longer believe in the certainty of warming or the projected magnitude. That makes me a skeptic. I am still open to reading science that supports both ‘sides’ of the argument.
The ‘problem’ I have with your bot is that it pushes one viewpoint; if climate change is so serious people need to look at the arguements and make up their own minds.

eadler says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:26 am
“Your personal opinion is not based on fact. Climate models can detect the CO2 warming signal very clearly. Look at the three graphs on this web page.”
*MY* personal opinion is not based on fact but the hardwired ASSUMPTIONS in the current creed of models are? Bot, you are becoming uppity now.

DirkH says:
November 7, 2010 at 7:11 am
“eadler says:
November 6, 2010 at 8:26 am
“Your personal opinion is not based on fact. Climate models can detect the CO2 warming signal very clearly. Look at the three graphs on this web page.”
*MY* personal opinion is not based on fact but the hardwired ASSUMPTIONS in the current creed of models are? Bot, you are becoming uppity now.”
Pondering this exchange some more. Let’s parse it:
“Your personal opinion is not based on fact.”
“Climate models can detect the CO2 warming signal very clearly.”
“Look at the three graphs on this web page.”
Sounds exactly like a machine talking. A human would have said “You’re wrong” or “You’re one of Delingpole’s acolytes”. But this one says “Your personal opinion is not based on fact.” Machine? Check.
The next statement.
“Climate models can detect the CO2 warming signal very clearly.”
Now – a human wouldn’t be gullible enough to confuse the output of a computer program – a climate model – with a fact. After all, human is shorthand for homo sapiens, so we can assume him to be sapient. This one confuses the output of a computer program with facts. Machine? You betcha.
“Look at the three graphs on this web page.”
Well, that’s exactly the Leckbot approach; give a short blurb and a link to a “resource”.
I’d say: Busted.
And that shall be my last word in this mock discussion.

Smokey says:
The amazing fact that acolytes […] still believe in the fantasy that a tiny trace gas controls the world’s climate makes them part of the entertainment. Some folks will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous. It’s cognitive dissonance, and it is apparently incurable short of an epiphany.

I’d suggest that the “epiphany” came first. AGW is just a story that fits and appeals to a certain group of people. The “management”, if you will, is well aware of this, and this is why politicians “care” about AGW.

The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is a crucially important development in world historical terms because this is the first time in over 600 years — since the Renaissance — that a new value system has arisen in western civilization, and it marks the first time in recorded history when a value shift has emerged at a global level simultaneously.
…
By 1999, the number of Cultural Creatives in the US had risen to 26% of the adult U.S. population (roughly 50 million). During this time, the Traditionalists had fallen from 50% to 24%, and the Moderns had remained roughly the same at 50%.
…
Cultural Creatives are an emerging consitutuency comprised of people who have participated in the social and consciousness movements that have emerged since World War II: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the jobs and social justice movements, the peace movement, the organic food and alternative health care movements, the new spirituality and self growth movements, etc.
…
– are spiritually motivated and committed to personal growth but are not dogmatically religious;
– embrace technology and economic development but only within a deep affirmation of the environment and community;
– tend to view the world from the perspective of holistic systems’
– pay attention to world events and global trends
…
Because research shows that Cultural Creatives pay the most attention to the floods of new information about planetary concerns, the environment and about new possibilities in technology and entrepreneurship; and care about a panoply of issues ranging from personal growth to global warming, we expect that in this decade, we are going to see their emergence as a real force in American politics and in public life.State of the World Forum: Cultural Creatives

It is no accident that the “moderns” find themselves pitted against the “cultural creatives”. The cultural creatives tend to characterise the height of modernity as “a giant oil slick”, whilst the moderns tend to wonder why the cultural creatives keep banging on about saving the world, when they don’t seem to take much care over hard science, rigour, truth, and scepticism. How can you save the world if you’re not interested in truly understanding it? How did “scepticism” become a negative label? Surely scepticism is good, a modern would think.
So, AGW appeals to cultural creatives, and they don’t need it to be true, and even if it isn’t that doesn’t negate their values, the values of cultural creatives. What cultural creatives want is more of their own values to spread around the world — they believe this will make for a better world. Meanwhile the moderns feel that somehow this is undermining modern values, the pursuit of truth, of science, of understanding.
Cultural creatives are in a difficult position. They are the first to wake up in the morning worried about the planet, but they don’t have the knowledge to fix it. We don’t understand the climate, the ecosystems, the nature of it all. But for the sake of spreading the values of the cultural creatives, they will keep making out that we’re faced with global issues that everybody has to respond to, and not in a “bioengineering” sort of way (that would be too modern), but in a cultural creative values way — become more spiritual, seek community, let go of consumerism, etc.
Many people who are exiting the modern stage, and slowly becoming cultural creatives, don’t realise themselves that they are shifting. But they do suddenly find AGW an incredibly fascinating and “real” issue.
Individuals can’t spot the pattern themselves because they are embedded inside the pattern. The culture is just absorbing them into it. They as people personally change, their values change. It is one world in balance, one united spiritual natural whole, they feel. So the AGW story sells very well.
The moderns are trying to figure out whether AGW is real or not objectively. But that’s irrelevant. What most matters to cultural creatives is that the cultural creative values should spread. The world is a whole!! We must act together!! And the people who don’t think that way, the moderns, they are just selfish and old and have their money and egos invested in dirty ways of life.
So, the epiphany literally comes first. People become cultural creatives. Then they become ardent AGW campaigners.
The only dissonance is that the moderns still believe this is a debate about science and truth. But it is actually a movement towards different values.

Verity Jones: “The ‘problem’ I have with your bot is that it pushes one viewpoint” Should it give both sides to the earth is flat debate ?
The bot tries to avoid areas of “actual” debate but “no warming since 1998” is factually wrong same with “sun is causing the warming” list of the main arguments are here http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Stefan: Yes, large institutions are more conservative than single individuals. They tend to have a moderating effect on extreme views, so it works both ways. “Nothing to worry about” and “OMG we’re all going to die” are extreme outliers in the bell curve of possible outcomes.

Nigel Leck says:
November 7, 2010 at 4:25 pm
“Verity Jones: “The ‘problem’ I have with your bot is that it pushes one viewpoint” Should it give both sides to the earth is flat debate ?”
At least there was verifiable evidence that the earth wasn’t flat.

Verity Jones: and we have verifiable evidence that the earth is warming, co2 levels are increasing and that an increase level of co2 has a warming effect. I think those facts are not in dispute. Correct ?

Nigel Leck says:
November 7, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Verity Jones: and we have verifiable evidence that the earth is warming, co2 levels are increasing and that an increase level of co2 has a warming effect. I think those facts are not in dispute. Correct ?

Tell the whole story please.
We have verifiable evidence that the Earth has warmed recently. However the extent of this warming is well within the range of normal variation. The null hypothesis – that temperature is behaving completely normally – cannot be rejected.
We have verifiable evidence that CO_2 levels have increased recently. We have a reasonable theoretical expectation that increased CO_2 should have a very small warming effect (much smaller indeed than the observed recent warming).
We have an unsupported bizarre hypothesis that the climate is inherently unstable and that water destabilises the climate by causing positive feedback. The suggestion is that this might amplify the small predicted temperature increase due to rising CO_2 levels into something more like the observed recent increase, or indeed into something potentially dangerous or even catastrophic.
Absolutely no evidence supports this positive feedback hypothesis. The overall effect of water is unknown. About the best that can be claimed for the positive feedback hypothesis is that it is hard to disprove. However predictions made using this model have failed the test of observation. For example predicted tropical warming in the upper troposphere is absent.
It is in fact much more likely that water stablises the climate by causing negative feedback. Historically temperatures, while they show considerable natural variation (including periods of significantly warmer temperatures than today), have shown no tendency to spiral out of control, which suggests that climate cannot be inherently unstable as the positive feedback hypothesis imagines.
On top of all this we actually have no evidence that a warmer world would be a less desirable place to live for us or for other life. Indeed despite the most strenuous effeorts of the IPCC the bulk of the evidence that we have suggests that a warmer world is likely to be more hospitable.

Ian H: “unsupported bizarre hypothesis” except that of course from the geologic records we can see that this theory is well supported. The Geologic society can say it so much better than me:-When was CO2 last at today’s level, and what was the world like then? The most recent estimates suggest that between 5.2 and 2.6 million years ago, the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reached between 330 and 400 ppm. During those periods, global temperatures were 2 to 3°C higher than now, and sea levels were higher than now by 10 to 25 metres, implying that global ice volume was much less than today. The Arctic Ocean may have been seasonally free of sea-ice.http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/webdav/site/GSL/groups/ourviews_edit/public/Climate%20change%20-%20evidence%20from%20the%20geological%20record.pdf

Nigel – Your comment does not address the issue of positive feedback which is the bizarre hypothesis in question. Nothing like changing the subject if you can’t beat the other guys argument.
But lets talk sea levels then since that seems to be what you want to discuss indead. You quote the 25m figure from 5.2 million years ago as if this is something we might have to worry about soon – flooded cities and all that. In fact the sea level is indeed rising … at the rate of 1.8mm per year, almost all of it due to thermal expension. This has been going on since the end of the last ice age. Eventually this slow and steady expansion will amount to something significant approaching the number you mention – but at 1.8mm per year we can handle it.
Indidentally I forgot to mention in my earlier summary that CO_2 levels increase whenever the temperature of the ocean increases because CO_2 is less soluble in warm water. It is therefore highly debatable whether those higher CO_2 levels you mention between 5.2 and 2.6 million years ago were the cause of this higher temperature, or merely a consequence.
OK – so thermal expansion isn’t going to cause a disaster – it is too slow to be problematic unless you are worried about our distant ancestors 3 civilisations from now – and their cities probably will be in different places anyway.
But perhaps the sea might rise faster than that – perhaps … duh duh duh dah … something might melt! Firstly note that for this to be possible you’d have to accept that the bizarre hypothesis I was talking about – the one about feedback from water and an inherently unstable climate – the one you avoided talking about – is actually true. But lets look at this unlikely scenario anyway. While I think the chances of this happening are extremely remote, I don’t rate the probability at zero, and if the consequences were bad enough it might be anough to make me take note.
So lets look at this absolute worst case calamity. If the entire greenland ice sheet were to completely melt global sea levels would rise … 7.2m. OK – that is enough to cause a few problems. People might even have to move! Not exactly a disaster for the human species though and given how unlikely this is? Nah … it won’t happen and I refuse to be scared by extremely unlikely scenarios. After all I might be hit by a comet tomorrow. Life goes on and people adpat. In any case while our civilisation might find this kind of sea level rise a tad inconvenient (depending on how fast it happened), the planet would not be in any kind of danger.

Stefan says:
Nobody has proved it is cosmic rays, but then nobody has proved it is fossil fuels. It is like trying to work out if a certain food is healthy, unhealthy, can cause disease, or protect from disease. I gather they are still trying to work out if being overweight is worse than underweight, given all the different things that each one is associated with. It is called complexity.
Nigel Leck says:
Stefan “proven” is an interesting word, your usage is more like how we use it in mathematical terms. There are very few things in life we can “prove” and indeed you would not wait before speeding up when walking across the road until we are certain the car will hit you.

AGW supporters imagine that skeptics are demanding 100% proof, and by that measure, nobody can prove the sun will rise tomorrow. But show me where you can quote a skeptic as saying, “I demand 100% proof” ?
What we do tend to demand, or I for one do anyway,
is the “irrefutable” evidence.
What percentage would you call that? 99%? 95%? Whatever number you like, pick one.
There’s always this little shuffle-dance that goes on when AGWers talk about “irrefutable evidence”. When the skeptics ask to see it, the AGWers say, “oh, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to be 100%, and we are well aware of all the uncertainties to do with clouds, feedbacks, sensitivity, etc.” So when skeptics then reply, “aha, so it isn’t irrefutable! there is room for alternative ideas?” the AGWers say, “oh, you can’t use this as an excuse to ignore the science! we have to do something! the evidence is so great, it is irrefutable!”
If we ask to see what it is that makes it so irrefutable, they counter we are being unrealistic and unreasonable — they say we are taking it to absurd extremes — asking for 100% mathematical proof — and by those extremes you wouldn’t function in life, you would never cross the road.
What this shuffle-dance means is, what it all means is that, “irrefutable” has NO QUANTIFIABLE BASIS. It is your gut judgement against theirs. Except, the AGWers claim it is all “science” but it is actually their gut, or their heart, or their feelings, or their dreams, or whatever.
Then, in a sort of psychological projection move, they accuse the skeptics of being “anti-science”.
Just quantify objectively what “irrefutable” is supposed to mean, please.

Actually the “irrefutable” claim is so vexing because it is effectively false advertising. Lookup “irrefutable” in the dictionary for what it really means.
Meanwhile, false advertising and deceptive methods :
Manipulation of standards
Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different than their widely-understood meaning.
Hidden fees and surcharges
Service providers often tack on fees and surcharges that are not disclosed to the customer in the advertised price.
So, like “Unlimited” broadband (ie. not subject to limits, but we’ll impose limits anyway). And like, “Irrefutable” evidence (ie. impossible to disprove, but we’ll ignore the counter evidence anyway).
The public is very accustomed to hearing false claims. I suggest that this is why the public themselves reject it.

eadler, while not technically a bot, is often indistinguishable from one, a living example of a succesful Turing test in reverse.
If you have a pet fantasy, assumption or hypothesis that you want validated, this is what you do: You feed it to a model, and as soon as the model regurgitates it back to you — as it will inevitably do — it has become no longer a fantasy or an assumption, but a proven naked fact that the model has *shown* for the world to take notice. It’s like an act of eucharistic transubstantiation, the models clearly endowed with incantatory powers.
Current scientific reasoning seems to be quickly shifting toward this kind of thinking. Years ago I had a discussion with another human bot who informed me that today “everything can be modelled succesfully,” including, he said “the entire universe”. I was duly awed.

From the Leckbot’s AlGoreithm link:
“…if the climate were to change as suddenly as it has at times in the past.”
Most alarmist nonsense is based on “What if” scenarios. Once again, the scientific method is nowhere to be found.
An interesting analysis of the scientific skeptics’ position can be found here. Note that when you take away the wild-eyed, red faced, unscientific arm-waving “what if” conjectures, we’re left with natural variability, which according to Occam’s Razor completely explains the current climate.
All the rest is sugar-coated globaloney being fed to the public in order to scare them into opening their wallets.

First statement in that paper: “Climate change is a defining issue for our time.”
Actually, that is not really the case. There are many other issues that are far more important in this time. I’m not sure why that society feels it can jump from geology to human development so easily, when as experts I’m sure they could claim that only experts in the field of geology are qualified to comment on geology. Yet they feel they know “the issue of our time”, like, the world, and everything.
Big issues in our time: the world is culturally fragmented into several major cultural blocks and stages, with largely incompatible beliefs and worldviews. There are multiple concurrent global cultural wars: as Americans try to modernise the Middle East; as fundamentalist religion is on a resurgence and is spreading in Africa; as Africa still tries to grow out of tribal warlordism; as New Agers try to “care for the planet”; as old power struggles resurface between military blocks; as Europe faces the consequences of its values and wonders what to do next. In half the world they are trying to industrialise, so a Kenyan woman can afford to eat and become an office worker rather than a prostitute. In the other half the comforts of industrialisation for the privileged classes are opening up existential questions about “isn’t there more to life than this?” Spoilt westerners feel consumerism hasn’t made them happy, so bizarrely they’d deny industrialisation to the rest of the world. “Wouldn’t it be better if everything just slowed down, and we had more community, and balance, and a healthier greener environment?” Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a healthy environment is one free of American soldiers and having enough to pay the local warlord. There is a lot of change going on; cultural change, social change, material change, and the world has little room left to thrash things out the way we did in the old days.
The AGW movement believes they are the ones concerned for the planet. Their narrow focus seems to blind them to the fact that their worldview is just one of many competing worldviews. All these competing worldviews are clashing with each other, and they will continue to clash. If AGW supporters think it is tedious arguing with modern skeptics, try arguing with the billions of fundie Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists. These are old movements and they are not going away. Try arguing with the billions of people who are desperately trying to become modern.
In the scale of things, AGW is not a “defining issue”– it is just a few leaves blowing in the wind.
That paper by geologists then goes on to comment about rapidly rising population and climate change:
“pressure for human migration could result on a large scale”
And? What of it? Who is going to change this?
How does climate change make any different the fact that a Nigerian would prefer to live in Europe? How does climate change alter the fact that already, due to dictatorships and warlordism, hundreds of millions are starving now? How does climate change alter whether we are running out of resources? How does climate change stop Africans converting to Islam? (Not that I’m saying they should be stopped, but I’d guess the Western greenies would judge this a bad state of affairs.)
Western scientists are also part of these worldviews. When they open a scientific information paper with that statement, you know what worldview they are embedded inside. But as much as people may desire a united and balanced and healthy environment, you aren’t going to get that by ignoring the desires and wishes and aspirations of billions of people who are different to you because their lives are different. There are 7 billion people on the planet and the vast majority don’t think the way you do. And AWG supporters’ answer to people who don’t think the same is to label them nutty deniers and oil shills. Good luck convincing everyone else. It is just more conflict that you are creating.
So, no, not a “defining issue”.

Funny isn’t
Can I ask if there’s any real skeptics to stand in front of a CO2 laser.
Televised injury waiver followed by a show of up the CO2 science hoax – or your finger being cut off.
It’ll certainly be the former – how about it?

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